Codename Villanelle by Luke Jennings

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There’s been a bit of talk in some quarters of the BBC bashing tabloid press about KILLING EVE and its success on BBC America. Why, oh why, they ask (because they’re British and they love to moan), have we – the licence fee payers – not seen this hit show before our American cousins?

Now, I don’t understand enough about BBC America funding to know whether it’s actually self-sufficient these days and can now fund its own programmes. But I’m going to give it the benefit of the doubt. What this delay has done however, is enable me to read the book before I watch it, and what a great read it is.

The tale of a beautiful hit-woman and her counterpart, the female spook who is tracking her down, CODENAME VILLENALE has incredibly vivid and well realised characters, a great eye for detail which lends a fantastic verisimilitude to the whole thing and – more importantly of all – wields its tension like a surgeon with a scalpel. Ratcheting it up at exactly the right pace to make every muscle in this reader’s body feel tense.

Having got to the end I can’t help but feel envious. Envy which comes with a creeping, terrible dread that maybe the tabloids are right after all. I can’t wait to read the next part of this, and I cannot bloody wait to watch the adaptation.

Where is it BBC? Why, oh why are we waiting?

 

You can read the opening of my thriller, EDEN ST. MICHEL right here!

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