Today it's a pleasure to take art in the BlogTour The Vault by Mark Dawson.
The Berlin Wall - 9 November 2019 marks the 30th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, one of the 20th Century’s most notorious structures. Built in 1961 to divide East and West Germany, by the late 80s it was 156 km long with a 15m ‘death strip’ guarded by 11,500 border guards under shoot-to-kill orders. At least 140 people lost their lives at the Wall. The last in 1989 just months before it fell.
Mark Dawson is an award-nominated, USA Today bestseller, with more than 20 books published and over 2 million books downloaded in multiple countries and languages. Mark was born in Lowestoft, in the UK. He has worked as a DJ, a door-to-door ice cream seller, factory hand and club promoter.
He eventually trained as a lawyer and worked for ten years in the City of London and Soho, firstly pursuing money launderers and then acting for A-list celebrities suing newspapers for libel.
Follow @pbackwriter on Twitter, on Amazon, on Goodreads, Visit markjdawson.com, Buy The Vault
About the book
In the dying days of the Soviet Union, the Berlin Wall still casts a long and deadly shadow in 1989.
MI6 agent Harry Mackintosh embarks on an audacious plan to exfiltrate a valuable asset through a tunnel under the Berlin Wall. But things go badly wrong and what could have been a brilliant coup ends in a bloody failure, with Mackintosh only just escaping with his life. Now he wants revenge.
Mackintosh returns to London for help. He asks for seasoned professionals but gets Jimmy Walker, a bank robber blackmailed into working with British intelligence. Walker has been given a stark choice: a long stretch in prison or a trip behind the Iron Curtain. It sounds like a recipe for disaster, but the resourceful robber - desperate to keep his liberty and lured by tales of Stasi gold - might just be the right man for the job after all.
There's nothing quite like a good old Cold War spy thriller. It's exactly the right amount of subterfuge, politics, history and action. Dawson manages to accurately capture the atmosphere of the silent war.
I got about three quarters in and wondered how many readers would see Mackintosh as the villain of the piece and not just the protagonist - the British intelligence officer with an axe to grind. There is no doubt about the fact that he uses and treats Walker with contempt.
Mackintosh is ruthless, reckless and not particularly interested in keeping Walker alive, despite the fact he is actually the key to his entire scheme. Again I would make the point that he perhaps isn't so different than the man he wants to bring to his knees.
It's a spy thriller - a combination of Kelly's Heroes meets The Lives of Others. You get the audacity of a man fuelled by greed, and perhaps by the thrill of the impossible task, which is balanced by the lack of compassion and heavy atmosphere of the Cold War scenario.
The Stasi is a chapter in history that is often overshadowed by the events of Nazi Germany and World War II and the uplifting event of the fall of the Berlin Wall. Those oppressive years of Stasi rule tend to rear their head in books and movies - it's easy to forget how many lives were controlled and destroyed during those decades.
I can't decide whether I was more intrigued by the spy storyline or the fact Walker was all gung-ho and I'll deal with the consequences later. Either way as a reader I definitely want more.
Buy The Vault at Amazon Uk or go to Goodreads for any other retailer. Publisher: Unputdownable eBook - 31 Jan. 2020. Paperback Ind pub 31 Jan 2020 - Audio available 31 October 2019. Buy at Amazon com.
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