Standing Alone

A Navy SEAL has gone rogue and now sells his skills as a professional assassin to whoever pays the most. Ryan French no longer cares who he kills as long as the money is right. His former superiors want him stopped, but they will not risk getting their own hands dirty, so they look for an outsider, a Brit, to do it for them.

They turn to SAS trooper Matt 'Lastman' Standing, a hardened soldier with experience in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria who has also worked alongside French in the past. Standing does not want the job. But a bad choice from his past has come back to haunt him, and he has little room to refuse.

His hunt takes him into the lawless forests of Humboldt County in northern California, where most of America's legal and illegal cannabis is grown. French is not the only danger out there. Mexican cartels, the Russian Mafia and Hungarian gangsters are all at work in the wilderness, and Standing must get past every one of them to reach his target. The book asks what turns a good man into an assassin.

Stephen Leather is a British thriller writer and former journalist, known for fast-paced, gun-heavy action novels.