The Accident Man - Tom Cain - Reviewed by Gary Yang

The Accident Man by Tom Cain is about a hard-nosed, steely-eyed assassin by the name of Samuel Carver and one of the biggest worldwide events in the last decade, the death of Princess Diana. Carver is a former Royal Marine, who works for an organisation called the Consortium. Carver kills people for money, using his former military background to help him make the deaths looks like an accident.
Samuel Carver is on holiday, he wants to quit his job as a professional killer, but at the last moment he gets a call from his boss, known to him as only Max, it is a job that he cannot refuse, 3 million dollars, to kill an Islamic terrorist. It seems like a straightforward job, set up a car crash in a Paris underpass, Carver decides this is his last job, one last hit before he retires. What Carver doesn’t realise is that he has been set up.
When the car arrives, with a motorbike behind it making the car speed up by pretending it was paparazzi, Carver is using a long barrelled torch, which emits a beam of laser which will temporarily disorient anyone when shone in their eyes. All Carver needs to do is to shine the beam into the driver’s eyes and the driver would do the rest for him. No trace would be left behind, it would be there and then it would be gone, the perfect weapon to cause an accident. As soon as the light is shone into the driver’s eyes, the car goes out of control, and crashes, killing everyone on board.
The two people on the motorbike then chase and attempt to kill Carver, who escapes capturing a beautiful Russian woman and three hours later Carver realises why he needed to die, he has just killed the most famous woman in the world, Princess Diana.
Carver soon falls in love with his Russian ally, Alix, but his love may be short lived as he gets captured by the man he knows as Max and his bosses. Could Alix, the love of his life, have double crossed him from the very start? Carver then gets tortured and nearly killed as he tries to escape from the clutches of the Consortium.
I really enjoyed this fast-paced thriller, I found myself not being able to put it down and recommend it for anyone who likes books by Lee Child, Matthew Reilly and the like. This is a very authentic and original book, and is a great read, it is the first great book of hopefully many by a new up-and-coming thriller/crime writer.