THE GRIFFIN WARRIOR

Birmingham’s time-traveling thriller follows eco-terrorists and an elite team trying to stop them.

The author picks up after his WWII-era historical novel Bocage (2025) with another mission featuring the group known as Jed Team Hugo. At the beginning of this installment, former professional football player and Jed Team member Charley Montgomery is recovering from wounds he incurred during a bizarre attack at Charles de Gaulle Airport. Charley and the “love of [his] life,” Jane, had an encounter with foes who included “two beautiful hippie girls with hatchets” and a “disheveled Frenchman” barking commands. Jane was killed in the attack. After Charley tells the Jed Team Hugo members the details, Rory, “an accomplished MI6 agent,” deduces that a group of eco-terrorists was behind the encounter. The group is run by a young woman with “iridescent red hair” who calls herself Red Medusa. Red Medusa is indeed trouble—she’s behind the destruction of an oil rig in the North Sea. Targets like oil rigs are merely the tip of the iceberg; the eco-terrorists may have control of a microbe that “will make the population effects of Covid-19 look like a mild sniffle.” Jed Team Hugo has their work cut out for them. The plot includes wild and disparate elements, such as characters who are demigods, a brief treatise on London’s historically poor air quality, and time travel through something called “Time Dilations.” It is, in short, not a typical thriller; it is also, at least initially, temporally confusing. For instance, when readers are first introduced to Rory, Charley explains that she is “the warrior princess from MI6 whom I carried on my shoulders as a toddler when I raced her father around the Serpentine in London”; he goes on to mention a “Nazi attack at Archangel in Hyde Park” in 1942. Though readers may not know what all this means at the outset, much excitement is in store as the narrative constantly zigs and zags in different directions.

A highly original adventure that overflows with lively historical material.