Today is my stop on the blog tour for The Coming Darkness. The debut thriller by Greg Mosse. Huge thanks to Sofia at Midas PR for my proof copy and spot on the blog tour.
SYNOPSIS
Paris, 2037. Alexandre Lamarque of the French external security service is hunting for eco-terrorists. Experience has taught him there is no one he can trust – not his secretive lover Mariam, not even his old mentor, Professor Fayard, the man at the centre of the web. He is ready to give up. But he can’t.
In search of the truth, Alex must follow the trail through an ominous spiral of events, from a string of brutal child murders to a chaotic coup in North Africa. He rapidly finds himself in a heart-thumping race against chaos and destruction. He could be the world’s only hope of preventing THE COMING DARKNESS . . .
MY THOUGHTS
The Coming Darkness is a near-future espionage thriller written as a classic spy story. We’re introduced to Alex Lamarque, an operative in the French external security service. He clearly believes in right and wrong, but he is no longer sure if the ends justify the means. Alex also has a reputation for reliable intuition and he has a growing sense of foreboding that something big and bad is developing. He is a comfortable and human hero and feels familiar from the off; he is easy to spend time with. Those around him are also well drawn with a believable history reinforcing the idea that these characters have had a life together before this story.
As with all good spy thrillers there are multiple strands, initially seemingly disparate but becoming intertwined as Alex’s assignments and intuition draw them together. Those around him, from his mother to his childhood friend and lover, are pulled into the multi-layered plots increasing the sense of jeopardy and raising Alex’s anxiety.
The near-future setting allows some liberties with political geography to be taken that set up a key plot, and believable changes in communication and transport are showcased with ongoing pandemics and climate change providing the dystopian backdrop with the displaced and migrants having no identity, living in ghettos outside of society. The haves still have, the have-nots don’t even have an identity.
While the start of the book is complicated as the plots are drawn the pace is always fast as Alex moves from one assignment to the next and the pressure builds as the story and his sense of foreboding grows.
An enjoyable, fast-paced , well constructed thriller.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
About Greg Mosse
A theatre director, playwright and actor Greg Mosse is the founder and director of the Criterion New Writing programme at the Criterion Theatre in London, running workshops in script development to a diverse community of writers, actors and directors. In addition, since 2015, Greg has written, produced and stage 25 plays and musicals.
Greg set up both the Southbank Centre Creative Writing School – an open access program of evening classes delivering MA level workshops – and the University of Sussex MA in Creative Writing at West Dean College which he taught for 4 years.
The husband of the bestselling novelist Kate Mosse, Kate’s hit novel Labyrinth was inspired by a house that Greg and his mother bought together in the French medieval city of Carcassonne, where the couple and their children spent many happy summers. Following the success of Labyrinth, Greg created the innovative readers-and-writers website mosselabyrinth.co.uk MosseLabyrinth. The first of its kind MosseLabrynth was the world’s first online accessible 3D world.
A multilinguist, Greg has lived and worked in Paris, New York, Los Angeles and Madrid and has worked as both an interpreter at a variety of international institutions and a teacher in the UK.
Greg and Kate live in Chichester, where Kate’s parents founded the Chichester Festival Theatre, they have two grown up children.
The Coming Darkness was written during lockdown and is Greg’s debut novel.