End Game

August 6, 2018
Set in London in 2002, Johnson’s hard-hitting conclusion to his trilogy featuring Det. Insp. Robert Finlay (after 2017’s Deadly Game) finds Finlay and his fellow Security Service agents operating in a world in which your enemies and your allies are often the same, and knowing who to trust and how far to trust are essential to survival. The nominal but unknown enemy is the secret organization Al Anfal; just about everyone privy to a revealing document about Al Anfal winds up dead. The known enemies include Supt. Jim Mellor, the feared head of the Met’s Complaint Investigation Branch, who dares Finlay to throw a punch in a brief but tense confrontation at a police station. The stakes rise when Finlay’s colleague Kevin Jones is cleverly framed for the murder of his girlfriend and arrested. Jones makes a daring prison escape that brings the action to a head. The relentless violence will weary some readers. Johnson, a former solider and Metropolitan Police officer, is at his best in detailing bureaucratic maneuvering. Agent: James Wills, Watson Little (U.K.).

Starred review from September 1, 2018
Someone is eliminating Brits who are familiar with a secretive terrorist organization called Al Anfar and its report on infiltrating Europe, the Middle East, and Africa. An author who was in the SAS, Britain's most elite special-operations force, has vanished, along with his literary agent, and the translator of the report is found dead, presumably a suicide. Among the next targets may be police inspector Robert Finlay and his best friend, Kevin Jones, former colleagues in the SAS. Then Jones is found near death, framed, it appears, for killing his lover in a murder-suicide pact. Meanwhile, Finlay connects with Toni Fellowes of MI5 to probe the Al Anfar situation, and attempts to deal with a superintendent out to get him. This is the final entry in the Robert Finlay trilogy (after Wicked Game, 2016, and Deadly Game, 2017), and, although it has enough backstory to stand on its own, knowledge of the earlier books will increase the reading pleasure. As a former soldier and former cop, Johnson knows his milieu, and he is a master at creating full-blown characters and building suspense through nonstop action. Readers will find themselves hoping that perhaps Johnson has a plan for bringing Finlay back in another series.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2018, American Library Association.)