A suspense novel by Vernon author James Osborne has been attracting early praise from reviewers and climbing up the bestsellers lists.
The novel, The Ultimate Threat, was released worldwide last week on Amazon by British publisher Endeavour Press Ltd. of London. By Saturday it had reached Number 20 on Amazon’s Kindle top seller list for thriller and espionage books.
Tom Kasey, author of the bestselling novel Cold Kill, described Osborne’s novel as “A brilliant action story ripped straight from the headlines.”
Osborne said his novel is “quite intentionally a disturbing glimpse into the heinous crimes being committed daily by religious extremists.
“But it is also a deeply compassionate account of the horrendous suffering by millions of innocent people simply because they had the misfortune of being present when those barbarians attacked their homelands.”
Economist Marilyn Cottrell of Burlington, Ont., called the novel outstanding.
“The Ultimate Threat is a compelling read — an action-packed thriller coupled with human emotions and human tragedy . . . there is a new twist as you turn every page,” said Cottrell, a university professor and self-described addict of thriller novels.
Five years in the making, Osborne said the novel is a fictional account of the rapid spread of terrorism in recent years across the Middle East, Africa and Europe, but with a difference.
“I have superimposed this unsettling story onto genuine surroundings in American cities. The objective is to bring home to everyone in the West the potential implications of the savagery being committed by ISIS and other barbarians like them, and their wannabe imitators.
“Make no mistake, unless we learn how to act more effectively we may find ourselves subjected to the same unspeakable sadism, on a much larger scale than we’ve already seen in New York, Paris, London, Nairobi, Boston, Ottawa . . . the list grows.”
British writer James Ferron Anderson, author of the popular novel, The River and The Sea, described The Ultimate Threat as “an up-to-the minute, exciting, fast-moving thriller that ties in with the terrible events of ISIS terrorism . . . brought right to the doorsteps of North American citizens.”
Anderson said he found the novel extremely visual with “scene after scene coming alive in front of me as the pages went by. Indeed, I found myself at times mentally casting it for a movie.”
“I have but only two thumbs to raise in praise of The Ultimate Threat,” said retired businessman Tim Young. “I wish I had more.”
Osborne is a former investigative journalist and corporate executive who turned to fiction writing after semi-retiring a decade ago. An avid reader, he says the first book he can remember browsing through cover-to-cover was The Complete Encyclopedia Britannica.
“I was perhaps eight years old and spent the winter paging through it.
“The alternatives were my mother’s romance novels, understandably repugnant to a boy my age, and a health and wellness manual with explicit colour illustrations of the human body my parents deemed their pre-pubescent son far too young to observe.”
