A thrilling debut that has been likened to John Le Carré, Raymond Chandler, and Terry Hayes…
Paris, 2037. The world has never been more dangerous. With a double threat of rising temperatures and new diseases threatening public health, governments face hard choices between cooperation and competition for scarce resources.
French special agent Alexandre Lamarque notices signs of a new terror group – one that is widespread and reaches the highest levels. Experience has taught him there is no-one he can trust – not his secretive lover Mariam, not his intelligence colleagues, and not even the people who trained him to be a spy.
As his investigation deepens, Alex identifies an ominous sequence of events: a theft from a Norwegian genetics lab; a string of gory child murders; a chaotic coup in a breakaway North African republic and the extraction under fire of its charismatic leader.
As the one man able to see through the web of lies, Alex may be the world's only hope of preventing The Coming Darkness.
It's such a pleasure to be hosting the blog tour for The Coming Darkness by Greg Mosse, particularly as today is publication day. Congratulations, Greg! Many thanks to Sofia Saghir from Midas PR for inviting me and to Moonflower Books for sending me an advance copy of the book.
The Coming Darkness is set in a near future which looks quite different from the present, but by featuring some of the most pressing current issues – climate change, global health and the refugee crisis, in particular – Greg Mosse describes a world which is disconcertingly easy to accept as fact. It's also a cracking thriller, with enough narrative strands to fill more than one book.
The opening chapters of this ambitious novel introduce numerous characters and locations and the complexity of the plot means that although there is a sense of foreboding from the start, it does take a while to grasp what is happening. However, the early scenes are compelling enough as individual moments, which means that although I (fittingly) felt as though I was in the dark, I was always keen to discover more.
The central protagonist, Alexandre Lamarque soon made an impression and he is the most intriguing character in the book. He is a highly skilled operative, able to infiltrate various organisations and agencies but his most singular talent is as much a curse as a gift. While not an actual soothsayer, Alex has an ability to predict trouble before it happens – and when all he can see is the coming darkness. he knows the world is in trouble. However, he is also feeling jaded and guilty about the deceptive nature of his missions. As a reluctant spy needed to save the world, Alex is dangerous enough to be exciting yet tormented enough to be sympathetic, and consequently seems to be made for the screen as well as the page.
There is a vivid cinematic sense to The Coming Darkness throughout, with a storyline that takes readers across, to Norway and arguably most interestingly to North African and the fictional state of Cyrene. The transient nature of popularity in politics, especially in the face of anger and betrayal becomes a key subject, with ruthless ambition and deadly intent combining to risk more than just the stability of one country. As an oil rich, well-armed nation which also offers safe haven to refugees, Cyrene has global respect but an insurrection threatens Prime Minister Mourad and the dramatic scene involving her attempted extraction is just one of the highlights of this multilayered thriller.
As the novel progresses, it becomes clear that the world has adopted a more proactive, authoritarian attitude towards health. Masks are still worn, people are screened and the unwell are expected to quarantine themselves, with the worst affected taken into compulsory isolation. Meanwhile, with wars, poverty and climate change already leading to migration on an unprecedented scale, it isn't difficult to foresee a time when the stateless become almost effectively throwaway nonentities, referred to as the Blanks.
Alex is convinced of an imminent catastrophe in this hyperconnected dystopia and with readers given an insight into events elsewhere, the tension steadily builds throughout The Coming Darkness. Greg Mosse cleverly seeds doubt about who can really be trusted in Alex's mind and the rising, distressing death count, twisty narrative and various revelations scattered throughout ensures it's impossible to predict the outcome. The breathtaking final few chapters are particularly terrific and a fitting conclusion to this intelligent, persuasive and dynamic debut. I highly recommend it and look forward to reading more from Greg Mosse in the future.
The Coming Darkness is published by Moonflower Books, purchasing links can be found here.
Follow the blog tour, details are below.
About the Author
Since 2015, he has written and produced 25 plays and musicals, often in collaboration. Over the same period, with Lou Doye, Doye Mosse Productions has created and financed an incredible range of traditional, VR and augmented reality story-telling experiences.
During the coronavirus lockdowns, he wrote two-and-a-half novels, of which THE COMING DARKNESS will be the first to be published.
After a degree in Drama and English from Goldsmiths College, Greg worked successfully in fringe theatre then moved to Paris where he continued working in theatre and trained as an interpreter, going on to live and work in New York, Los Angeles and Madrid.
Then, after a decade in comprehensive inner city education, he helped his wife, Kate Mosse, to develop the innovative readers-and-writers website mosselabyrinth.co.uk - an entirely new way of building an online community that employed many of the techniques we take for granted today.
Out of this, he and Rachel Holmes created the Southbank Centre Creative Writing School - an open access program of evening classes, delivering MA level workshops to all comers. Simultaneously, he wrote and validated his own MA Creative Writing that he taught for four years for the University of Sussex at West Dean College. (He has also delivered extremely successful writing workshops for Guardian Masterclasses, Edinburgh Book Festival, Cheltenham Festival, Chichester Festival Theatre and many others.)
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