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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 (13 customer reviews)
RRP: £11.99
Price: £7.88 & 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) + Hot Blood (Dan Shepherd Mystery) + Dead Men (Dan Shepherd Mystery)
Price For All Three: £16.96

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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 (13 customer reviews)
  • Amazon.co.uk Sales Rank: 67,566 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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Live Fire (Dan Shepherd Mystery)
83% buy the item featured on this page:
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Customer Reviews

13 Reviews
5 star:
 (5)
4 star:
 (6)
3 star:
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2 star:    (0)
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Average Customer Review
4.2 out of 5 stars (13 customer reviews)
 
 
 
 
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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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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars Not bad..., 8 Mar 2009
By N. Brett (Wiltshire, England) - See all my reviews
(TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)      
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.
'Spider' Shepherd is an undercover officer who is inserted into the world of the bad guys, as illustrated in the previous books, all of which are worth picking up. Here Spider is after a bunch of British bank robbers who live in Thailand and commute to the UK for the occasional big bank heist. As Spider gets closer to the gang, there are a group of terrorists also planning something in London, and eventually their paths will cross.....
Although not quite up to previous standards this is not bad. The finish is a little hurried and there are a few moments where you do think "hang on, why didn't he..." but overall not a bad way to while away a few hours.
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Most Recent Customer Reviews

5.0 out of 5 stars Great Read, Great Location
I wanted to read this because it was based in Pattaya but the tale is so riveting it could have been based anywhere. Pattaya provides a superb background. Read more
Published 6 days ago by Sam

5.0 out of 5 stars live fire (book by stephen leather)
i have purchased every book by stephen leather,from amazon in cluding the two latest titles live fire and dead men. Read more
Published 26 days ago by Mr. J. Hughes

4.0 out of 5 stars A cracking read
My first Stephen Leather novel and devoured it while on holiday after picking it up by chance at the airport. Read more
Published 1 month ago by Andrew Cooper

4.0 out of 5 stars A safe read for Stephen Leather fans
Another book from Stephen Leather with Dan "Spider" Shepherd as the main character. I think I have pretty much read all of the Dan Shepherd series once they read paperback and... Read more
Published 2 months ago by J. H. R. Cornell

3.0 out of 5 stars live fire , stephen leather
good fast paced , but i hate to say it not his best , plot line a bit thin , come on stephen lets get back to tango 1 standard .
Published 3 months ago by Nicholas E. Smith

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 5 months 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 5 months 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 5 months ago by Paul Hanratty

4.0 out of 5 stars a good read- nothing more
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? Read more
Published 7 months ago by R. markus

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 8 months ago by big al

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