Martin Österdahl is joining us today with his novel Ask No Mercy. Here’s the publisher’s description:
Global intrigue, espionage, and mystery from a thrilling new international voice.
Max Anger is a man on the edge. The former fighter in an elite band of special-ops soldiers in Sweden, Anger is haunted by battle scars, a childhood spent in the Stockholm archipelago, and his own mysterious family past. Now behind a desk at Vektor, a think tank conducting research on Russia, he’s met his match—and fallen in love—with fierce fellow operative Pashie Kovalenko. Like all of Vektor, she’s set her sights on the tenuous future of her country.
When Pashie goes missing in Saint Petersburg, Anger rushes headlong into a volatile Russia, where a new president is about to be elected in the midst of a technological revolution. At the movement’s heart is a start-up Pashie had been investigating, one surrounded by rumors of organized crime and corruption. But the truth is more shocking than Anger could have ever expected.
Now time is running out for Pashie. Racing through a storm of violence and deception, Anger gets ever closer to a sensational secret—and to the Russian madman with dreams of restoring one of the cruelest regimes in the history of the world.
What’s Martin’s favorite bit?
MARTIN ÖSTERDAHL
My favorite bit from Ask No Mercy is when Max arrives to the location where he believes his girlfriend Pashie is held captive. The wind is growing in strength, soon reaching gale force. The surging Baltic Sea, its waves breaking across the beach. A large industrial area, dimly lit by widely spaced streetlights. Silhouettes of roofs against a black sky. Brick chimneys leaning in various directions and from their mouths white smoke rises toward the sky. The place in known as Colony Field, a chameleon, dressed up as warehouses and hangars. Supposedly a former Soviet marine research center, rumored to contain very different and clandestine activities. The center itself is a beast that could die and live again depending on which way the wind blows.
A long Soviet style limousine drives into the compound. One of the limousine doors opens; a foot, a leg, and then a second leg emerges. A man straightens up his long body and stretches into his full height in the courtyard. The military leaders gathered in the courtyard greet him with great awe. Everything around the man seems to shrink, even the huge limousine. The man is wearing an elegant brown overcoat. He turns his head to both sides as though he is adjusting his neck. The long neck looks like it belongs to a bird, hidden by the collar of a turtleneck sweater. His head is disproportionally small compared to the rest of his body. He looks so old, like man from another time.
The old man, thought to be dead long ago, is nicknamed the Goose, and surrounded by legends. From the wars in Afghanistan, he is known as the “butcher of Nowzad”. Once a musical prodigy who mastered the Russian masterpieces so brilliantly he impressed the Soviet leaders. His long-fingered hands were put to control other instruments when he as a young man became Stalin’s favorite spy and was stationed in Stockholm, Sweden, at the end of the second world war.
Max waits to make his entry into the compound until the meeting of the black generals is over and the Goose is left alone. After fighting off two personal security guards he sees the now familiar silhouette of the Goose through a wall of glass. Behind the old man the walls are covered with maps of Scandinavia. The Russian spy notices Max’s presence and the two men move to opposite sides of the glass wall to face each other for the first time. Knowing that the glass is bullet-proof and that they are not able to harm or even touch each other, they just stand there, staring into each other’s eyes. And for each passing second Pashie is clinging to the last shreds of life in the ice-cold and bacteria infested water that the Goose has put her in.
The encounter has a mutual shocking revelation to both of them. They have met before, that ominous day in Max’s childhood when his father was found dead in a suspicious car accident in his home town in Sweden. Through a mobile phone the Goose speaks to Max from the other side of the glass, words that explains the mystery that has troubled him his whole existence, words that he never had wished to hear. The pieces of the puzzle fall into place, but the effect it has on Max was not what he had hoped for. Instead of a sense of relief of finally understanding who he truly is, he is filled with uncontrollable fury.
The scene sets off the climax and resolution of Ask No Mercy, where our hero Max has to reevaluate everything he knows about himself to save his girlfriend and his country.
LINKS:
Ask No Mercy Universal Book Link
BIO:
