The Final Mile

This is a skilfully paced, sparely written thriller with protagonists you really care about. It grapples with large-scale contemporary social issues like political disenfranchisement and economic injustice, while at the same time never losing sight of the specific dilemmas and struggles that make the individual characters so compelling and rounded. I also very much admired the way the author interweaves the parallel plots more and more tightly as the book progresses, until they come together in the final devastating denouement. This book leaves the reader with some really difficult questions, which don't disappear when the last page is read. Is there any point so worth making that anything goes? Is there a moral difference between killing for ideological reasons and for personal reasons? Is that a valid distinction? What is the difference between terrorism and war? This is a fantastic page-turner, but it is much more than that; it has real depth and a strongly beating heart.

An unusual mix of revenge thriller and "state of the nation" polemic. A formally law-abiding citizen comes to the end of his tether and, putting his Army explosives training to use,leaves a trail of murder and mayhem along the M4 corridor. Plenty of tension as he heads towards his ultimate target. Will he be stopped in time? Bankers and politicians are caricatured mercilessly (sometimes dispatched equally mercilessly) and the unsubtle portrayal of the rich and powerful is somewhat at odds with the more realistic depiction of the other characters and their backgrounds but this is fiction after all– who says it has to be fair? Fast paced action and a bleak vision of contemporary Britain. Probably not suitable for ardent Tory supporters!

For his second book, The Final Mile, Cal Smyth has gone from foreign to domestic focussing on the all too real pressures and strains of 21st century British life. Boom and bust hit Ryan hard in sleepy west Wales Swansea.He has everything then before he knows it his life is falling through his fingers like the sand from Swansea bay. He responds in taking on the people he knows have given him pain. And he gives them back pain with interest. He moves east wreaking revenge on the rich and priveleged. A man with nothing to left to lose finally breaks free of his shackles.

Really enjoyed this author's first novel so have this a try. It did take a while to pick up the pace but once the mission the story literally explodes. I'm not so politically inclined but the voice here is strong and the message clear. Haven't read something like this for a while. Seriously recommend and suggest to stick with it as the pace does pick up.

I was pulled into The Final Mile from the beginning. At first I was unsure of what was happening and where. It was reassuring to find myself on home turf. The comfort of familiar surroundings did not last for long. So easy for the fabric of family life, work, friends and the environment we live in to become threadbare. In the book the trivial and major incidents are all plausible; they even seem a natural sequence. Perhaps it is believable because the characters have backgrounds that could be anyone's. Any of us could be drawn out from our `normal' existence to behave in `abnormal' ways. The pressures of modern life, expectations, ambitions - of the individual and wives/husbands, combined with family histories, attitudes and expectations of parents, all influence how we operate. The main character, like many people, has no real control over how he lives. Politics, world affairs, are irrelevant until he has to reconsider who is responsible for the crises he faces. Inherited ideology which had been buried, from father to son, emerges from son to father. Is the son to blame for the sins of the father? The story is thrilling and chilling, told with honesty and wry humour.AidaSwansea.

The basic requirement of a thriller is that it should be fast paced. It is not a genre to be hovered over. Far from it. It is the type of writing that should drag you in from the opening words and hold you there. There is where you will stay until you have read the final line of Cal Smyth's thriller, The Final Mile.Shakespeare's warning that, "when troubles come they come not single spies but in battalions" is more prescient than ever in this book that positively speeds along. The fate that befalls Ryan Morgan is depressingly common and even banal. It is nothing new. We are all aware that a life that seems to be running along seamlessly can be swiftly derailed. Ryan loses his business, his wife and even his self respect in a welter of body blows.That is part of the story, the rest deals with how he reacts to the new reality. His entire world is in shreds. Ryan is ex army, a hero and not someone given to walking away from a challenge. Far from it. He runs rather than walks towards it. Some people are going to get hurt. That fact is very swiftly confirmed. Whether those people will be those who deserve it will, to some extent, depend on the readers world view.By setting his novel in the present Smyth has presented the reader with a panoply of villains that in another time would not have been held culpable. Indeed in another time they would have been figures of authority and respect. Bankers, CEOs of large corporations, products of the great universities, politicians and senior army officers in this case all come under scrutiny. The privileged of modern society must face the wrath of the dispossessed and Ryan is not the sort of man you want turning up at your front door. The action moves between Swansea, both sides of the tracks, Bath and London with various stops along the way. In pursuit is his boyhood friend Evan, now a police officer together with the the seried ranks of British police and MI5. It is all leading to a final confrontation. A devotee of the thriller will not be able to get there quickly enough.The book fairly fizzes along with the tension maintained every step of the way. When there is nobody and nothing left to rely on a man has to trust his instincts. This is what the book's central character does. Sadly for the guilty ones his instincts have been honed on other battlefields. And if you think the premise is far fetched then you simply aren't reading the right newspapers these days. This is as entertaining and thought provoking a book as you are likely to read in a very long time.