Disclaimer: I am already a fan of the Mike Kingdom thrillers by David Jarvis, and this addition to the series is not going to change my mind.
“The Green Feathers” opens with a critical international ncident, which seems all too realistic and is politically bang up to date. We then go back in time, presumably to see the lead-up to the crisis, and the reader assumes that they have an idea of where the action is taking us. That is a dangerous assumption.
Jarvis lays out a string of seemingly unconnected tableaux, and then begins to develop plotlines, again seemingly unconnected. The reader is guided through these – how carefully, one does not realise until extremely late in the action – and gradually it dawns that everything is being connected, bit by bit. Through this process, the big picture is only grudgingly revealed and one of the great pleasures of the book is trying to spot which pieces of information and which characters are going to be of the most importance. For the record, I got nearly everything completely wrong and the ending came as a complete surprise!
Jarvis’ books are notable for their command of tricky global situations and the detail of international power-play. His presentation of the great and the powerful can be ironic, but to present complicated situations with a sure touch and make them understandable is far more difficult than he makes it appear. Here, he ranges over Commonwealth relations, drug wars and the problems presented to billionaires by the UK’s tedious tax laws. Despite this world-wide perspective, the book is given a firm grounding in the UK with Mike Kingdom, the American protagonist. Mike has made a home in the UK, and as an analyst for the CIA is often found in front of a computer tracking down the bad guys through the virtual world. To balance Mike, a friend and fellow operative, Tina, is the real life traveller, taking the reader round the Caribbean. Using the two of them, Jarvis takes the reader on a series of mini-epics, as Mike and Tina, often without being able to communicate with one another, follow their own quite different types of research straight to the heart of the novel’s devastating ending.
While I found the ending a surprise, I must admit that for me the journey there was what I most enjoyed. It takes a great deal of skill to make a piece of research on a computer engaging, yet Jarvis does it with ease, leading Mike and the reader to some chilling conclusions. Similarly, a host of minor characters are drawn in and for some their threads made part of the pattern, while others turn out to be effective distractors – but never just a distractor. Only looking back does one realise that everything meant something. And so I can’t comment too easily on any one scene in the book, for it might give something away. I certainly can’t tell you why the book is called “The Green Feathers” (oh, all right, The Green Feathers is a pub) nor why there are gherkins on the cover…
The Green Feathers is published by Hobeck Books
Fiona Forsyth is the author of Death and the Poet