Just Finished Reading: Blood Count by Robert Goddard (FP: 2011)

When surgeon Edward Hammond was offered a considerable amount of money to perform a straight forward transplant for a Serbian gangster he’d never heard of before he jumped at the chance. Going through a particularly messy divorce at the time he saw it as both an opportunity to get out of England for a while and to salt away a nest-egg his wife would never know about. Weeks later none of that mattered as his wife lay dead in a car park victim, so the police believed, to a random and as yet unsolved attack. Thirteen years later the same gangster is on trial for Human Rights violations and mass murder. Seeing the Serbs name in the press brings back unpleasant memories but nothing more until the daughter of his long ago patient comes to him with a proposition – help her recover millions in stolen money to finance her father’s defence or have it made public the Hammond arranged his wife’s death as part of his transplant fee. Even if he denied it, even if he was innocent his career and tidy life in London would be in tatters and his daughter’s love and respect would be jeopardised or lost forever. What can he do but submit? Little does Hammond know that his search for the money will take him half way across Europe, to the International Criminal Court in The Hague, to the coldly efficient banks of Switzerland and back to Serbia where it all started? But with millions at stake who can he really trust especially when he begins to see conspiracies all around him and even starts to question whether he was in fact responsible for the death of his ex-wife.      

    

Goddard seems to have two recurring themes in his books – or at least in those I’ve read so far – that uncovering past events is never a very good idea and that questionable actions in the past will inevitably either be uncovered or will return at some point to bite you in the ass – hard! Blood Count clearly falls into the second category. Hammond had almost forgotten about his little Serbian operation and few people where aware he’d even been out of country – until it all blew up in his face 13 years later. As always (with one modification) Goddard tells a very good story full of twists, turns and revelations which push the story forward at a fair clip. His characters are, on the whole, very believable and his main protagonists are usually very believable middle-class men clearly out of their depths and in danger of going under at any minute. Here Hammond is not a particularly pleasant man, a little too arrogant and a little too full of his own self-importance and blissfully unaware as to just how naïve he really is. His journey through Europe and his dealings with some very unpleasant characters is a real wake-up call. It’s interesting to see how he grows as a character and comes to appreciate what he had done all those years ago and what his operation had enabled to continue – the murder of hundreds of people who might otherwise have lived. The plot was dense and convoluted enough to keep me guessing right to the end – and throwing me off track more than once – without being too convoluted to follow or too fanciful to knock me out back into the real world, although he did sail pretty close to the edge from time to time. Overall this is a very competent thriller which raises some interesting moral questions about culpability and responsibility for our own actions. Oh, and the ending was so not what I expected. I almost turned the last page open-mouthed. Recommended.