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Gerald Seymour's masterly new novel The Collaborator continues to draw critical acclaim. Library Journal gives a starred review, and the St. Louis Times-Dispatch offers a glowing critique to Seymour's latest thriller.

"Happy-go-lucky Eddie Deacon, a 27-year-old teacher of English to foreigners, meets and falls in love with Immacolata, a young Italian studying accounting in London. When she disappears, having returned to Naples to collaborate with the Carabinieri, Eddie decides to track her down. But she's never told him her last name, and, even if she had, most likely he would not have connected her to the criminal underworld of the Neapolitan Camorra. But as a daughter of the Borelli family, she participated in a host of illegal activities, one of which, the dumping of toxic chemicals, is responsible for the death of her best friend. When Eddie stumbles into the family's hands, his life is on the line. Either Immacolata refuses to testify against them or Eddie dies—and not even a renowned hostage negotiator will suffice to save the lives of all involved. Seymour's (Harry's Game; The Walking Dead) 26th novel builds relentlessly to a fever-pitch conclusion in which a Camorra killer, a hostage rescuer, and a kidnapped victim—characters developed with consummate skill—are all one step from death. Highly recommended for thriller readers. - Library Journal

"British author Gerald Seymour has built a following with his two-dozen-plus crime thrillers. Some critics rank him with John le Carré and Frederick Forsyth as a master of suspense. But with "The Collaborator," Seymour moves beyond suspense. Yes, the plot teems with criminals, and yes, the climax features a face-off between a negotiator and a bad guy who has a pistol and a hostage. But no, "The Collaborator" isn't just another thriller. At its heart, this tale is a novel.

The starring role goes to Immacolata Borelli, who's studying accounting in London. She plans to put her schooling to work back home in Naples, where her family runs mob rackets that include squeezing protection money from neighborhood merchants.

But Immacolata gets a shock when her best friend in Italy dies of leukemia. The disease had its roots in the toxic industrial waste that Immacolota's family trucks in from northern Italy and dumps across the countryside around Naples. So stricken is Immacolata that she flies home, checks in with prosecutors and the police and says she's ready to turn on her family. Back in London, her disappearance dismays her British boyfriend, Eddie Deacon. He flies to Naples to track her down. Trouble is, a stranger who pops up in Naples and asks for directions to a mob family quickly becomes a marked man. The mob family's hit man snatches Deacon and gets a message to authorities: Either you drop Immacolata as an informer, or we kill Deacon.

Unlike so many suspense thrillers, "The Collaborator" follows a plot that's distressingly realistic. This tale has no weapons of mass destruction, no international schemes — just grubby, real-life, low-life crime. Seymour takes readers far deeper into his characters than do most thriller writers. And by the standards of the genre, the book's 500-page length amounts to a thriller and a half." - St. Louis Times-Dispatch

Gerald Seymour's novels are all intricately plotted and beautifully detailed--it's why we love publishing them. We were glad to see the Washington Post agree with us this weekend, calling his latest novel, THE COLLABORATOR, "powerful" and adding to their wonderful review that "no summary can suggest its depth and texture."

International suspense fans, take note! Full review below.

'The Collaborator': Taking on a modern-day Italian crime family

By Patrick Anderson
Monday, February 21, 2011; C02

Immacolata Borelli, the quasi-heroine of Gerald Seymour's powerful new novel, is 25, tough, gorgeous and exceedingly spoiled. She's spoiled because she's the beloved daughter of the leaders of one of the most powerful and ruthless crime families in Naples.

When we meet her, however, she's in London, and the family has problems. She's there to babysit her brother, who's living under an assumed name because he faces murder charges in Italy, and also so she can study accounting, the better to help manage the family fortune. Her father, the head of the crime family that his parents started during World War II, is in prison. But, not to worry, Immacolata's mother, who makes Lady Macbeth took like Mary Poppins, is running the family business quite well, with the assistance of an assassin called Il Pistole, who modestly admits, "I have killed more than forty men. I do not know exactly how many men because it is not important to me."

One day, walking in a London park, Immacolata meets a nice young man named Eddie Deacon, a teacher of English, and soon is sharing his bed and fixing him excellent Italian meals. Then she receives word that her best friend back in Italy has died. Knowing no details, she catches the first plane and hurries to the cemetery, expecting to be greeted warmly by her friend's grieving family. Instead, they call her a whore, knock her to the ground, spit on her and furiously explain that their daughter died of leukemia caused by the toxic wastes that Immacolata's family had for years been dumping near their village, a sideline that earned them tens of millions of euros.

Traumatized by her friend's death and this hatred, Immacolata returns to London and reaches a fateful decision: Her family is evil, and she will bring them down by telling all she knows to Italian prosecutors. Her family will disown her, of course, and have her killed if they can penetrate the protection the authorities will give her, but she boldly returns to Italy to send her mother, brothers, grandparents and several of their hired guns to prison.

She leaves London without saying goodbye to Eddie, who has no idea that she's part of a crime family. The poor fool is in love, so naturally he hops a plane to Naples and hastens to the Forcella neighborhood that her family holds in its iron grip. It's a great come-into-my-parlor moment. The family takes him pris

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More acclaim for The Walking Dead: "Gerald Seymour's latest novel, The Walking Dead, is reminiscent of a patchwork quilt. At first, you start with many dissimilar items arrayed before you, with no idea how these unrelated bits can possibly be sewn together into a final product. Eventually, however, after much time and effort and connecting this piece to that, you end up with a gratifying result. The "pieces" in The Walking Dead are the array of seemingly unrelated characters and plot lines that Seymour ultimately crafts into a satisfying thriller. . . What makes this novel noteworthy is Seymour's attention to the book's underlying themes. He delves into the question of how young men get into situations where they willingly risk their lives for their ideals, drawing parallels between the suicide bomber and a young volunteer fighting in the Spanish Civil War seventy years earlier. Other sub-texts explored are the efficacy of intelligence gathering and old-fashioned detective work, and the roles chance and coincidence play in events.The book is well paced, starting slowly and gradually picking up speed before barreling through to the end and some of the plot twists are truly shocking. Readers are advised to have a contiguous block of time available for the last third of the novel; once started, it's difficult to put down." - BookBrowse.com

Master thriller writer Gerald Seymour is back with a new tale of heart-stopping international suspense: "The Walking Dead is compulsively readable but also highly complex and, perhaps, overly contrived. Like the vest filled with explosives and a detonator, the book has many threads. Several seem to have little to do with the plot, but, curiously, those threads are among the most compelling. One concerns the diary of a British volunteer in the Spanish civil war, and Seymour uses it to ruminate on whether one man’s freedom fighter is another’s terrorist. Timely, topical, and gripping.”— Booklist

Gerald Seymour's new thriller Walking Dead has been given a starred review in Kirkus: "Gerald Seymour (Rat Run, Traitor's Kiss, etc.), a genuine master of the modern thriller, brings together old-line British spies, a brilliant war-maimed American spook, a couple of classic crooks, a bankrupt professor, the literary ghost of a doomed idealist in the Spanish Civil War, a cell of disaffected young British Muslims, a brave but alienated copper and a half-English-half-Arab villain with a hatred for the West. Heroics, religion, sex, torture, doubt and ever-increasing tension in a cerebral blend. A thriller for all sides of today's war."

2008 is the Year of the Rat, and what better way to start the new year than with Gerald Seymour's Rat Run, a terrific political thriller from one of the best espionage writers in the world. Seymour has a brand new novel, Walking Dead, coming from Overlook this summer. To celebrate Chinese New Year, we're offering a free copy of Rat Run and an advance reading copy of Walking Dead to one lucky person. To enter the drawing, send us an email with "Rat Run" in the subject line to: [email protected].

The first great American novelist, Nathaniel Hawthorne was born in Salem, Massachusetts on July 4, 1804. He was an aspiring writer, working at the custom house in Boston, when he lost his job. (Interestingly, Herman Melville, who wrote Moby Dick, also worked at a custom house, only in New York City.) When Hawthorne came home to tell his wife the bad news, she said, "Now you can write your book." He asked how they would be able to live on while he wrote, and she opened a desk drawer and showed him a pile of gold pieces she'd saved out of the household allowance – $150, enough to cover their expenses for several months. He sat down at once and began work on The Scarlet Letter about Puritan Hester Prynne who has to wear the letter "A" on her chest after she commits adultery. The first edition of 5,000 copies sold out in 10 days.

July 5 is the anniversary of when George Bernard Shaw quit his job in order to write. It took 10 years before he began to make a living as a critic and then began to produce the plays that made his name as a writer. He lived with his mother all that time, and she never complained about supporting him. He later said, "My mother worked for my living instead of preaching that it was my duty to work for hers; therefore take off your hat to her and blush."





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