With Barracuda 945 Patrick Robinson takes many of the testosterone-fuelled certainties of the modern military thriller and turns them vehemently on their heads. Confronted with a massacre of Palestinian civilians by the sorely provoked Israeli troops he is advising (but who will not listen to him) SAS commander Ray Kerman rediscovers his long-lost Islamic roots, turns on his own men and defects, for good. 

          What follows is a disaster–not for the world of Islamic fundamentalism into which he slips as neatly as a shark into a welcoming ocean but for the West which trained him. Robinson proceeds to demonstrate how a properly trained commander trusted by the Iranian ayatollahs and their terrorist proxies could do damage so much more severe than 9/11 that it takes the breath away. 

          This feels like the first of a sequence–Ray Kerman becomes Ravi Rashood, finds true love and works mischief while half a world away a CIA analyst puts the story together and plans some eventual come-uppance. This is an interesting thriller because Robinson has some real political agendas, however reactionary they may be, and because he has a certain sense of how things work.