Vicious Circle (Hector Cross Book Two) by Wilbur Smith

 

Vicious Circle (Hector Cross Book Two) by Wilbur Smith.

Published 28th June 2018 by Zaffre.

From the cover of the book:

He'll stop at nothing to protect the ones he loves.

Hector Cross is under siege. After a lifetime of making enemies, Cross has settled down, but it seems someone missed the memo. When his life is turned upside down in a brutal attack, Cross recognises the handiwork of a terrorist organisation from his past and swears vengeance.

But as he follows the trail across the globe a new more terrifying battle begins. For there are worse things in Cross's world than terrorist kidnappers. Can he save those he loves - or will he pay the ultimate price?

The Second Hector Cross Thriller, following on from Those in Peril.

***********

Ex-SAS operative, and security expert, Hector Cross is back! He has settled into retirement at the side of his new wife, oil tycoon, Heather Bannock, and they are looking forward to the the birth of their first child. But their comfortable life is interrupted in the most traumatic way when Heather becomes the target of a vicious gang.

The brutal attack has all the hallmarks of the work of the terrorist cell Hector and his Cross Bow team came up against in the first book in the series, Those in Peril, when they undertook a dangerous mission to rescue Heather's daughter, Cayla - but surely they have all been wiped out? Hector must travel the globe once more to find out who is responsible for the ambush on Heather, and he will stop at nothing until he serves the culprits his own brand of justice...

This second instalment in the gripping Hector Cross series begins a few months after the very satisfying reckoning that Hector and the Double Cross team previously engineered against a dastardly terrorist cell, and their army of pirates, in Somalia. Hector believed that their Somali enemies had all been killed, bringing the relentless blood feud to an end, but now he is not so sure. Hector calls on his team for aid and in doing so Wilbur Smith cooks up a new thrilling adventure that takes us back to Abu Zara, to the heart of Mecca, to the mean streets of Texas, and eventually to deepest darkest Africa via a horrible episode in South America. 

Smith does an excellent job of building tension for the greater part of this book, and keeps you turning the pages as Hector and the gang find themselves in increasingly sticky situations on the trail of the bad guys. There are some very unexpected twists, which I cannot share for fear of massive spoilers, but suffice to say that the truth behind this new campaign of violence makes this much more of a mystery/family drama story than the first book. 

Smith takes some bold storytelling decisions to bring all the ambitious threads together. About half-way through, he suddenly throws in a 'book-within-a-book' scenario, which takes you sideways into some distressing Bannock family history, in order to direct the plotlines towards the very exciting Cross Fire shoot-em-up conclusion. This is an intriguing aside, but it does counteract the pace which has built up by this point in the story, which is a shame. I think some of the more bizarre banana republic shenanigans and debauched scenes, which Smith seems to revel in, could have been cut here to bring the story back on course a bit quicker, but fortunately the tempo steps up again once Hector and co reappear.

My favourite thing about this book is the way the Cross Fire team come back together and set about planning the demise of the evil villains at the root of all the disturbing trouble. It was great to see some old friends back in the thick of it, especially Russian firebrand Nastiya, who is such a great character, and there are some new faces mix things up nicely.   

Smith has an impressive knack of carrying you through his gloriously contrived finales with action-packed skill, leaving you on a very entertaining high, and he achieves this once again in Vicious Circle. He also drops in a cracking hook at the very end to take you into the final book in the trilogy, Predator... I cannot wait to see what happens next.

Vicious Circle is available to buy now in multiple formats.

Thank you to Zaffre for sending me a copy of this book in return for an honest review, and to Compulsive Readers Tours for recruiting me for #TeamWilbur.

About the author:

Wilbur Smith was born in Central Africa in 1933. He became a full-time writer in 1964 following the success of When the Lion Feeds, and has since published over fifty global bestsellers, including the Courtney Series, the Ballantyne Series, the Egyptian Series, the Hector Cross Series and many successful standalone novels, all meticulously researched on his numerous expeditions worldwide. An international phenomenon, his readership built up over fifty-five years of writing, establishing him as one of the most successful and impressive brand authors in the world.

The establishment of the Wilbur & Niso Smith Foundation in 2015 cemented Wilbur's passion for empowering writers, promoting literacy and advancing adventure writing as a genre. The foundation's flagship programme is the Wilbur Smith Adventure Writing Prize.

Wilbur Smith passed away peacefully at home in 2021 with his wife, Niso, by his side, leaving behind him a rich treasure trove of novels and stories that will delight readers for years to come.