To The Last Page

You don't associate David Mark with international espionage thrillers, but the author of the famed DS McAvoy series and other dark crime fiction works successfully across a number of genres including historical fiction ( Anatomy of a Heretic ) and even a mental health memoir ( Piece of Mind ). As a genre however, for me spy thrillers are something of a genre of the past, made almost redundant not just by the fall of the Iron Curtain and the Berlin Wall, but by the internet. Who needs to send agents into the field nowadays when you can employ hackers and deploy drones? There are exceptions to every rule and - again from a personal perspective - there are a few authors who keep the spy thriller relevant and exciting, managing to bring a contemporary feel to an old school of writing. In my limited reading in the genre, Mick Herron stands out with his Jackson Lamb/Slough House series, just about managing to keep one step ahead of the absurdity of modern day political and establishmen...

Opening up any David Mark thriller is a bit like opening up a mausoleum or rooting around in a cemetery. A fresh body might be closer to the surface, but as you dig a little deeper you find that it's only the latest in a long history of death. That’s perhaps not the nicest imagery you could come up with to describe a book, a little bit morbid and unpleasant, but if you’ve read any of this author’s books before you’ll know that far more grim events are described therein. In the case of The Burying Ground it's particularly appropriate, as that’s literally what happens when a storm destroys a mausoleum in a cemetery in the north of England close to Hadrian’s Wall. It uncovers not just a fresh corpse, but the bones of those long dead come tumbling out with it. Metaphorically speaking. That grim discovery of an unexpectedly fresh dead body in an old mausoleum is revealed to Felicity Goose and Cordelia Hemlock, an usual pair of unlikely friends who had been visiting the cemetery whe...