Richard's Review:

Remember those dim and distant days when we didn’t work from home? Remember office politics; the stab-in-the-back at the coffee machine; character assassination in the canteen? Now turn that into reality. Want someone’s job? You gotta kill them first. Except we’re not talking about any ordinary kind of job in John Brownlow’s gripping Agent Seventeen.

Seventeen is probably the most skilled assassin in the world, but he’s just one in a long line of killers who governments the world over turn to when diplomacy fails. They’re the best of the best. And to get the job, Seventeen must target Sixteen and extinguish him, just as Sixteen did Fifteen, and so on.

Which doesn’t exactly guarantee Seventeen a long and happy life at the top of the pyramid. Because one day Eighteen is going to come for him.

Judy's Review:

Someone has described Seventeen as John Brownlow’s reinvention of the hitman novel. You’d never guess it’s a debut thriller; to work, a story like this has to drip with confidence from every page and Brownlow certainly isn’t short of confidence, any more than his central character is.

The skill in putting together hitman thrillers is getting us to care about someone who is, after all, a paid assassin. That Seventeen is a mercenary pure and simple is made clear early on: offered a job not much to his liking, he’s about to turn it down.

The resulting figure gives Seventeen ‘a moment of what I can only describe as intense emotion.

So, he kills for the money. A hired gun. A ruthless rat.

You’ll end up liking him.