Incendiary had the misfortune, last year, to be published in hardback on July 8. I must admit that I thought that it was a run of the mill thriller. Well I couldn’t have been more wrong. Obviously the cover isn’t really right, and the book is about 200 pages shorter than the average thriller.
The reason I got this mistaken idea is that the book effectively opens with a bomb going off at Arsenal’s new stadium while they’re playing Chelsea.
The book is told from the first person point of view of a woman who has just lost her husband and her son, while she was making love with another man. And then it goes on to deal with the aftermath of the terrorist atrocity as we see how she deals with the trauma.
I’m not sure how much I believed in the characters, although they are interesting. There’s a certain feeling of pastiche about them – as though they’re supposed to be stereotypes. I could believe their actions, but not necessarily their behaviours or words, if that’s not a contradiction.
A worthwhile read that’s not going to detain you too long, but it could probably have been better.