When young film-maker Ewan Casher gets a distress call from his mother, he rushes to the family home to find that she is dead, his father is missing and he himself the target of some shady characters. Unknowingly duped into a relationship with one of the people after him, he finds himself unwittingly caught between two top American spy agencies as they stalk him for some information they believe his mother forwarded to him. On his tail is the elusive Jargo, a rogue agent who sells information to the highest bidder, sometimes stealing the information back from another buyer. As Ewan discovers a huge secret about his parents, and himself, whilst searching for his father, he finds himself in more and more danger, and has to call on a few favours from unexpected sources to help him get from a to b without being captured.
Jeff Abbots Panic starts off as a thrilling fast paced read. It throws you straight into the action whilst developing its main character as a likeable sort, vulnerable yet approachable. But as Ewan is thrown from one disaster to the next, and from one villain to the next, it starts to lose your interest. There are various twists to the tale, some believable, some not so much. Its well written and for the most part enthralling, but some of the plot points are stretched to the maximum in order to pad out the book. There is a massive dip in the middle and I didn't feel that the book really recovered from that. I struggled to get to the end, and remained with it only because of my loyalty to the start of the book. Abbots a decent writer, and I am willing to give him another shot, but he needs to learn to keep momentum with his story. Its too easy to let it descend into the contrived, and when you lose your reader, its difficult to get them back again.
