Rating: 4/5
Review:
Very good but a weak ending
I enjoyed a lot of This Is Gomorrah very much. For a good deal of
its length I found it well written, witty, rather insightful in
places and genuinely exciting. Sadly, for the last quarter or so it
declined into a rather silly, generic-feeling cyber-thriller.
The set up is good.
Azi is a cyber-geek in London who spends time on the dark web where
he has cleverly set up a false identity to infiltrate and sabotage
far-right groups. This brings him into contact with Gomorrah, a very
sinister organisation on the dark web who deal in all sorts of highly
unsavoury things and whose dark purpose becomes gradually clearer
throughout the book. Azi suddenly finds himself caught up in a
real-world web of espionage and terrorism in which everyone seems
untrustworthy and he is on the run with powerful people trying to
kill him.
It all sounds pretty
familiar, almost stale stuff, but Tom Chatfield makes it feel very
fresh. He writes very well, there is genuine wit here, laced with
some sharp observations, plausible detail and decently drawn
characters, all of which makes for a good story. For a while I
thought this might be a five-star book, but the denouement (which I
obviously can’t say anything about) let the book down badly for me.
It was just plain silly and rather clumsily done, I thought, and I
was disappointed by it. I have given it four stars on the basis of
the first part of the book, but only just in the end.
This is plainly
being set this up as a series. I like Azi as a character and
Chatfield writes well so I may well try the next one, but I can only
give This Is Gomorrah a rather qualified recommendation.
(My thanks to Hodder
and Stoughton for an ARC via NetGalley.)
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