Spiral is an elite and secret organisation created to be the last bastion against terrorism. In a world torn apart by war and plague, Spiral fights to keep civilisation alive. Now, however, Spiral itself is under attack and it is up to a few battle-scarred men and women to stop Spiral and even civilisation from disappearing.

If you were thinking that this is a novel in which you need to suspend belief - then you would be only half right. This is a novel with a plotline so divorced from reality that even Oprah Winfrey wouldn't be able to reconcile them.

Now, I don't mind a dose of unreality but for it to work the writing needs to be intoxicating, needs to weave and flow sweeping you away from the reality of this world into the reality of the plot. This doesn't.

The writing is about as subtle as a builder on a building site and about as original. Bullets smash, brains stir, bodies slam and clichés roll down the pages. The Science Fiction in this novel seems to serve merely as a device to make the characters' life easier.

There certainly doesn't appear to be any creation of a future world or of a background to the future that Spiral inhabits. Important events that would help you to understand characters or the plot were merely hinted at making me think that this will be part of a sequence of books or that Andy Remic wasn't sure of what these events were.

The language and plot would almost be forgivable if this was a book that offered something new or had a fresh angle on a subject that affects us today, such as the policing of the world.

However, the main message of this novel seems to be: take the usual stock of thriller characters, sprinkle liberally with sexism and gratuitous violence and finally garnish with a spurious Science Fiction angle and you, too, can create a tired, jaded, cliché ridden book like ‘Spiral’.

Katie McGivern