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Live Fire (Dan Shepherd Mystery)
 
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Live Fire (Dan Shepherd Mystery) (Paperback)

by Stephen Leather (Author)
4.2 out of 5 stars See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
RRP: £11.99
Price: £8.00 & this item Delivered FREE in the UK with Super Saver Delivery. See details and conditions
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Frequently Bought Together

Live Fire (Dan Shepherd Mystery) + Private Dancer + Hard Landing (Dan Shepherd Mysteries)
Price For All Three: £19.98

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Product details

  • Paperback: 474 pages
  • Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton (22 Jan 2009)
  • Language English
  • ISBN-10: 0340921749
  • ISBN-13: 978-0340921746
  • Product Dimensions: 23.2 x 15.2 x 3.4 cm
  • Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
  • Amazon.co.uk Sales Rank: 4,096 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Product Description

Review

'Pacy read . . . totally convincing . . . They're Jeremy Clarkson with a gun'

(BBC Radio 5 Live on LIVE FIRE )

Praise for Stephen Leather's novels

(: )

'A brilliant read that stands out of the morass of so-so military thrillers around nowadays.'

(News of the World )

'Everything is taut and dangerous from the first page of Stephen Leather's new novel . . . The action is relentless until the breathtaking conclusion.' (West Australian )

'Best action . . . since the best days of Gerald Seymour'

(Courier Mail, Australia )

'This is an aggressively topical novel but a genuinely thrilling one, too.'

(Daily Telegraph )

'A hardboiled thriller, well-paced throughout with a surprisingly well-developed sense of morality regarding the sins of the past'

(Sunday Tribune Review )

'As tough as British thrillers get . . . gripping' (Irish Independent )

Product Description
Mickey and Mark Moore are Ordinary Decent Criminals – hard men who live by their own code and leaders of a gang that has made millions at the point of a gun.

But when Dan ‘Spider’ Shepherd is sent to Thailand to infiltrate the tightly-knit team of bank robbers, he discovers that he has more in common with them then he first thought. And that perhaps being a career criminal isn’t the worst thing in the world.

As Shepherd and his Serious Organised Crime Agency colleagues plot the downfall of the Moore brothers, a more sinister threat stalks the streets of London. A group of home-grown Islamic fundamentalist fanatics embark on a campaign of terror the like of which Britain has never seen. Car bombs and beheadings are only the prelude of what they have planned. And Shepherd is the only man who can stop them.

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What Do Customers Ultimately Buy After Viewing This Item?

Live Fire (Dan Shepherd Mystery)
84% buy the item featured on this page:
Live Fire (Dan Shepherd Mystery) 4.2 out of 5 stars (8)
£8.00
Hard Landing (Dan Shepherd Mysteries)
5% buy
Hard Landing (Dan Shepherd Mysteries) 4.0 out of 5 stars (11)
£3.99
Dead Men (Dan Shepherd Mystery) (Dan Shepherd Mysteries)
4% buy
Dead Men (Dan Shepherd Mystery) (Dan Shepherd Mysteries) 4.0 out of 5 stars (13)
£8.39
Hot Blood (Dan Shepherd Mystery)
4% buy
Hot Blood (Dan Shepherd Mystery) 4.5 out of 5 stars (10)
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Customer Reviews

8 Reviews
5 star:
 (3)
4 star:
 (4)
3 star:
 (1)
2 star:    (0)
1 star:    (0)
 
 
 
 
 
Average Customer Review
4.2 out of 5 stars (8 customer reviews)
 
 
 
 
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

 
18 of 18 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars Carrying a torch for Charlie?, 15 Jan 2009
By Joseph Haschka (Glendale, CA USA) - See all my reviews
(TOP 50 REVIEWER)   
This review is from: Live Fire (Hardcover)
In LIVE FIRE, author Stephen Leather's hero of several novels, Dan "Spider" Shepherd, an undercover operative with Her Majesty's Serious Organized Crime Agency (SOCA), is off to Thailand to infiltrate a Pattaya-based British gang of master bank robbers that periodically returns home to replenish the funds for its exorbitant lifestyle. Meantime in London, a home-grown cell of Muslim jihadists is planning a bloody outrage that'll kill hundreds. Because of Spider's particular karma, the two plots ultimately intersect.

Leather spends much of his time living in Thailand. Therefore, it's no surprise that the storyline of LIVE FIRE puts Shepherd there for most of the narrative, but is somewhat surprising that the author has taken so long in the series to do so. Leather's physical description of Pattaya and its status as "the biggest single prostitution center in the world" suggests a comfortable familiarity with the place. (For a depiction of the Thai sex industry, see Stephen's excellent novel, Private Dancer.)

For readers whose first encounter with Spider is LIVE FIRE, the plot deserves 5 stars. For one such as me, who's followed his exploits over the years, it rates perhaps 4. The Shepherd character has perhaps become too familiar and/or I've become jaded.

In order to introduce the new reader to Dan's career path with SOCA, the narrative inevitably begins with the end game of a crime caper from which Spider must extract himself as the cops close in but before his cover is blown. Then, he immediately gets new marching orders to follow for the duration of the story from his boss, Charlotte "Charlie" Button. Subsequently, there are a couple pages in which Dan, a single father, has a guilt trip when he tells his young son, Liam, and his dead wife's parents that he's off on another job and won't be around to spend quality time. (While I know this digression establishes Spider's just-a-regular-bloke humanity to newbies, perhaps next time we could move forward a decade when Liam is interested in girls and won't miss Dad so much.)

It's in LIVE FIRE that Dan is first inferred to be carrying a torch for his boss, Charlie Button, for which felling evidence surfaces during a visit to one of Pattaya's bars:

"There were two pneumatic blondes dancing topless and a stunning redhead in a red thong and high heels doing a solo on the second podium ... Two more girls joined the redhead. One was a blonde with wavy hair, green eyes and milk-white flawless skin, the other a brunette with a pageboy hair-cut and dark brown eyes. She was like Charlotte Button, Shepherd thought, disconcerted.

'You like her?' asked Sergei.

Shepherd reddened like a schoolboy who'd been caught looking at a pornographic magazine. 'She's fit,' he said."

Now, I bring this up because I think Button one of the more intriguing characters of the Spider series. Plus, I suspect that she's hot. So I'd like to take the cheeky liberty of suggesting to the author the emphasis of a future book, i.e. that the narrative focus be on Charlie with Spider as an ancillary character. Thus, the saga of the latter can continue, albeit through the perspective of someone else, while a different facet of Dan's world can be developed and the repetitive mold of the series as a whole broken. Thinking outside the box.

Alternatively, some act of violence by one of the jihadist groups fermenting in the U.K. might seriously cripple or kill Liam. The emotional devastation could transform Shepherd into an agent of vengeance. One of Leather's first books, The Chinaman (Stephen Leather Thrillers), took that general approach, and it was one of his best reads.

Are you with me on this, Stephen?

All of this said, I'll keep reading installments of the Spider series for as long as they continue to be penned; I'll even put them ahead of any of Andy McNab's thrillers in the unread queue on my bookshelf.
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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars A spicy Tom Yum, 28 Feb 2009
Another solid outing for Spider, this time going undercover to join a group of bank-robbers in Pattaya, Thailand which is home territory (Private Dancer) for Leather and he covers the sordid resort well and with some amusement as Razor manages to enjoy himself. The robbers attempts to buy some RPG's crosses a plot with some British born Muslim terrosists similarly buying weapons to cause havoc at home. Spider has to charm and deceive the felons as well as stop a terrorist attack, in a plot that becomes as spicy as good Tom Yum Goong. A fine read even if a tad rushed and far-fetched at the end. For those who enjoy Thai crime try Jake Needham or John Burdett's books.
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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars a good read- nothing more, 8 April 2009
By R. markus "RONNIE MARKUS" (ISRAEL) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   
I have been a fan of Stephen Leather for years now and have read all of his books, but i feel that this one was just a nice read and nothing more.

Why? basically because it is just too pat and smooth. The grit and excitement of his previous books is just missing. If this is your first Stephen Leather novel, then i am sure will enjoy it.

The book is basically two stories interwoven. The first sees our hero Dan Shepard hitching up with some very clever bank robbers who live in seedy Pattaya and every now and then pop over to blighty to do some audacious roberry's. Dan's job is to ingratiate himself with the robbers and then working with them get them caught red-handed by the good guys (gals) SOCA- "Charlie" Button. As a stand-alone this is a great read and in the books last pages it all comes to an expected climax with a little twist as Dan finally gets involved with a bunch of home-grown terrorists who are determined to pull off the perfect terrorist attack in London.

This is where i find fault with the book. Mr Leather could have written a seperate story just about the terrorists and left it at that. By intertwining the two stories he weakens the whole book, as it is just too much to take in. Think of it like a good cake with too much sugar.Great cake but just a little bit less sugar and it would be supberb.

Having said all this the last two sentences of the book are really neat and i wont spoil it for you.

All in all a good read, but i have come to expect more of great author !
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Most Recent Customer Reviews

5.0 out of 5 stars Live Fire
Brilliant. Stephen Leather is refreshingly un-PC (don't know how he gets away with it!). Unlike most long-standing authors, he maintains the same high-standard. Read more
Published 1 month ago by H. Hirst

5.0 out of 5 stars Live Fire
Typical fast moving novel from the master but a little predictable now. Dan Shepherd can save the world and never seems to rest or sleep or relax, so he is getting to be a super... Read more
Published 1 month ago by Simon Trelawny

4.0 out of 5 stars Live Fire
I rate Stephen Leather as a thriller writer and eagerly anticipated another Spider story. I was a little disappointed with "Live Fire" as I felt it lacked the really gripping... Read more
Published 1 month ago by Paul Hanratty

3.0 out of 5 stars Not bad...
Stephen Leather does not write bad novels, just those within the scale of good to very good indeed. This falls to the lower end of that scale but is still a solid thriller... Read more
Published 4 months ago by N. Brett

5.0 out of 5 stars spiders lonely
again i cannot fault this book, tense , thrilling etc. i just feel that Dan needs some stability in his life?. either with Katra his au pair or even perhaps Charlie Button?. Read more
Published 4 months ago by big al

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