Cold Justice: The Sunday Times bestselling thriller (Mallory)

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It's dark, gritty and nail-biting with high stakes and increasingly palpable suspense that cannot fail to give you palpitations. Although spaced carefully throughout the book, the chapters give a real insight into the man and the tragedy that haunts him.

Cold Justice is filled with thrilling details and insights that can come only from boots-in-the-mud experience.

Faced with being out of the military after a raid went sideways, he reluctantly agrees to help the mum of one of his injured comrades. Middleton’s first foray into fiction is a decent action thriller, ticked all the right boxes for me.

When he goes to visit his former colleague, Donno, he is asked for a huge favour by Donno's mother - to try and track down her younger son, Scott, who has gone missing without a trace. What I liked the most about this book was that this was not the typical thriller where some tragedy the hero could do nothing to avoid happened and that is used as a reason for him be some masculine fantasy of what a "real man" is supposed to be. He's not the perfect all action hero, although it's fair to say he's pretty handy in a fight and has a real awareness of his surroundings and the imminent threats as you would expect from someone of his pedigree. Everything I knew about Ant though, I learnt from watching this Russel Howard interview which was enough to see that he put a lot of himself into Mallory's struggles after getting off duty. Born in Portsmouth and raised in rural France, Ant set his sights on a career in the armed forces and didn't stop striving until he achieved his goal.The chapters are short, the pacing just right and the tension well maintained throughout the novel, keeping me turning the pages and determined to see what is what and who the not quite so invisible enemy really are. I was expecting it to be pretty shallow, not particularly well written, and to give up after a few chapters. Yes it’s very generic, the mentally unstable ex-soldier wanting to make amends for his platoon dying in battle, blah blah. Readers who prefer action rather than brain teasers and superheroes who talk with their fists rather than their cognitive abilities will definitely enjoy this novel. Mallory is reluctant to take on such a daunting task, but he almost immediately recognises that it is possibly his one and only chance to gain a little redemption as Donno was one of the colleagues who was injured on the battlefield thanks to Mallory’s operational shortcomings and bad judgement.

Now he walks the world, helping those in need, running away from a past he'd rather forget and the killer inside him. In fact his only real 'kryptonite' is his guilt over what happened to Donno, but it is also his greatest strength and what drives him to do better. Descriptive moments, no doubt inspired in part by Middleton’s own life, are life like, on point and transports your mind well. It's a truly globetrotting thriller as Mallory traverses the globe trying to complete his mission and it becomes even more enthralling and absorbing as it progresses with the tension being ratcheted up to extreme levels towards the end; it leaves you feeling breathless, and before you know it another similarly nail-biting moment swiftly arrives.

Was also pleased to see that Ant did not fall into the male author trap of over-sexualising the female characters (e. One time when he is visiting, Donno's mum approaches Mallory and she tells him that she is worried about the safety of her son, not Donno, her other son Scott. Mallory himself is portrayed as a complex character so the reader is not alienated from his violent actions.