To The Lions by Holly Watt

 

Casey Benedict is an investigative journalist at the Post, a broadsheet to rival the Times or Telegraph (the author is a former journalist who worked for The Telegraph). One night she overhears a conversation in a club which appears to indicate that rich and powerful men are travelling to somewhere in the third world to shoot refugees for sport. So begins her investigations. With her colleagues, Miranda and Ed, she finally firms up the story and locates it as occurring in Libya. They then have to try and get inside the network to expose it.

This is a novel that has been compared to Le Carré or Gerald Seymour, and I can see that comparison. It’s a story plucked from the headlines, at least as far as the refugee crisis is concerned (and the international corruption that goes with it) and could just as easily work with the protagonists being employed by the intelligence services. 

As it is, the author is a former foreign correspondent for the Telegraph and she clearly knows her stuff. I must declare an interest here, in that I too was a journalist for a good twenty years, albeit in current affairs television. While our paths never crossed (the author was a print journalist, while I was television production) I feel that we’re similar in having a love/hate relationship with our jobs. 

The author clearly believes in journalism at its best, and hence her heroes who save the day and expose dark deeds to sunlight are reporters. There’s perhaps a bit of wish fulfilment here as the Post has admirable funds, while the reality is that budgets aren’t what they once were. Finally, there’s a sense of disdain. Her hero Casey is willing to do whatever it takes to get the story, and while she's on the side of the angels (she’s no tabloid hack just after the latest celebrity tittle-tattle) she does grapple with the ethics of it and doesn’t always act admirably. I have a lot of sympathy with this, for I myself had similar conflicts of faith when working in television. Of course, this is all similar again to Le Carre and Seymore whose characters are often disgusted with the world of espionage and it’s grubby compromises.

To The Lions is a well-plotted novel and well worth a read. The author’s written a sequel and while the story in this novel is sown up for the most part, there are some satisfyingly unfinished threads. For example, not all the villains get their comeuppance. Personally, I don’t like a plot which ties up too neatly, so this is fine by me and I wonder if some of these will tick over into book number two?

4 out of 5 stars