The first to die is Matt King, an incel genius with a job at a British weapons firm. He is lured to a pub car park by a too-perfect Estonian named Helina, who tells him she’s “so wet for you right now” and then vanishes while he bleeds from the ears. Within a few pages his teeth have fallen out, his bladder has given up, and his body lies twitching on tarmac. The official cause of death, according to the company’s PR line, is nothing to worry about. Just another lonely man in the defence sector, gone before his time. But it’s not the first time. Another death. Less violent but just as sudden, occurred at the same facility weeks earlier. A pattern is forming. DeepSpear calls it unfortunate.
“He was about to experience the greatest shag of his life. That was when he heard the noise.”
In Second Strike, there’s always something deeper than the coroner’s verdict. That’s the function of thrillers like these: to fill the blank spaces of state secrecy with plot, pace, and plausible paranoia. This is not a book about loneliness or online dating; it’s about a security breach, a torpedo programme, and the private contractors who do the empire’s dirty work after dark.
“King wasn’t exactly sociable… a paranoid loner with a genius-level IQ and no friends. Perfect material for a mark.”
Chris Ryan, like Andy McNab before him, belongs to that small canon of SAS novelists whose books sit somewhere between war memoir, tabloid fever dream, and a lads’ mag from the early 2000s. But Ryan’s later works have gained something else: not literary ambition, but a bleak awareness of Britain’s transformation. Second Strike is not quite a critique of the military-industrial complex, but it certainly doesn’t celebrate it either. DeepSpear, the fictitious arms firm at the book’s core, is less BAE Systems than a Thatcherite horror: privatised, unaccountable, paranoid, soaked in jargon and staffed by men and women whose loyalties can be bought in cryptocurrency.
“DeepSpear provided clients with everything from cyber security to advanced drones and robots. The kind of people who valued discretion.”
The man sent to investigate King’s death is David Hawkins: ex-SAS, divorced, on a diet of antidepressants and bourbon. Hawkins is a classic Ryan protagonist. Haunted, lethal, still capable of operating at the edge of violence—but what makes him interesting here is how broken the system around him has become. He’s not just investigating a murder; he’s trying to hold together a country that no longer recognises its own shadow. Surveillance is everywhere, but nobody’s watching. Weapons are developed by ghost firms hidden behind brass plaques in Mayfair. Deaths are cleaned up, denied, not explained.
“This isn’t about the police. We need to get in front of this thing.”
Then there’s Jock. Not a codename, just what everyone calls him. Wallace finds him passed out in his car outside the Devonport site, sleeping off a hangover. At first, Wallace only vaguely recognises him. Later, Jock reveals himself as DeepSpear’s head of security at the facility—one of theirs. Another ex-Regiment man. A known quantity from the old days. And like many of Ryan’s recurring types, Jock is still dangerous in the way old weapons still are.
Jock doesn’t run scenarios or study printouts. He acts. When persuasion fails, he plunges a Bulgarian restaurant owner’s hand into a deep fat fryer. No warnings, no delay. Just trauma. We learn about the incident not through direct narration, but by accident. Wallace, Millar and Nish overhear the screaming through a pocket-dialled phone call. It’s brutal, jarring, and almost farcical in its exposure, but it tells you everything you need to know about how Jock operates. Ryan doesn’t overplay the scene. He doesn’t have to. Jock is that familiar Chris Ryan figure: the broken blade. Alcoholic, unshaven, functional. A man who does what no HR-compliant contractor will.
He has a real name. Billy Wallace knows it, but no one uses it. In the military, every Scot becomes “Jock”. It’s a kind of lazy shorthand, but also something more: a way of flattening identity into function. Reliable. Brutal. Dispensable. It’s not a name, it’s a role.
But Wallace isn’t intact either. The only reason he has this job is because an officer friend pulled strings. His marriage is over, his family gone, and he drinks too much. There’s a death that haunts him too, never fully named, but present in the silences. The difference is that Wallace still carries a thin veneer of control. He observes, calculates, maintains the illusion of procedure. But he’s cut from the same cloth: built to kill, dragged back into a world that never quite lets you leave.
Wallace and Jock are two faces of modern British covert power. Wallace is the bureaucratic end. Composed, clean, bound by plausible deniability. Jock is instinct. He smells like old whisky and ends problems with force. Wallace is who you hire when you want a clean extract. Jock is who you send when the data’s smeared in blood.
Ryan doesn’t ask us to admire them. He just makes the case that the state still needs men like this, even as it pretends it doesn’t. They’re not obsolete. Not yet. Because when the system breaks down, it’s still men like Jock and Wallace who are called to clean up the mess. Ryan knows the world is changing, that men like this are slowly becoming surplus to requirements. But the point is they’re still on the books. Just not in public.
It’s not the killers who make you feel sick in Second Strike. It’s the politicians. Defence Secretary Mandeville floats through the novel like a human press release: overweight, smug, permanently insulated by handlers. He speaks in soundbites and manages crises like he’s managing a dinner reservation. He doesn’t understand what’s happening. He doesn’t need to. His job is to appear in photographs and let the private sector do the bleeding.
Then there’s the man in the bowler hat, an unnamed intelligence figure, smoking a pipe in the corridor. He’s not a parody. He’s the state’s memory of itself: deniable, unreadable, permanent. He barely speaks, but when he does“Ukraine was a mistake” the line lands like a curse. Where Mandeville postures, the bowler hat watches.
“It’s not about the police,” Hawkins is told. “We need to control the narrative before it ends up controlling us.” The logic is pure corporate counter-intelligence. The dead engineer’s laptop contains files on DeepSpear’s Makara project—an autonomous nuclear torpedo named after a mythical sea monster, and there’s a suggestion that both King and his manager were GRU targets. The weapon exists. The contract is signed. The only question is how many more bodies it takes to secure the deal.
Second Strike moves like a bullet. Ryan writes the way his characters operate: efficiently, violently, without introspection. Hawkins, for all his tactical brilliance, is hollowed out. His daughter won’t speak to him. His nights are spent drinking in the dark. He’s a post-war myth: the soldier as saviour, the loner as last line of defence. But what he’s defending is no longer a country. It’s a corporation. DeepSpear. The logo. Profit.
There is a moment when Hawkins and cyber-security specialist Alex Millar, ex-DET, sharp as broken glass, drive west to Plymouth. Millar isn’t just background tech support. She’s former military intelligence, with time in covert ops and a mind wired for asymmetric threat response. She handles metadata, dark-web trails, and system hacks, but there’s more than competence in how she moves through scenes. Her past in the Detachment gives her presence, not just skill. Their dialogue is exposition, but beneath it is a quiet admission: the state no longer runs the show. Millar is as vital to the story as any operator, but she still exists within a genre that gives most of the firepower, and narrative agency, to men.
“You are not to discuss this situation with anyone else in the building.”
DeepSpear doesn’t just shape the narrative, it owns it. The hacks aren’t external breaches; they’re features of a system where data, loyalty, and silence are all commodities. There’s no journalism, no oversight—just strategic containment. The public doesn’t matter. The truth is whatever gets buried first. And before the police arrive, the only priority is locking the leak and erasing the trail.
Thrillers are rarely praised for their politics. But Second Strike gets one thing right: Britain no longer has a monopoly on its own security apparatus. What remains is theatre. A dead man behind a pub. A defence firm writing its own rules. A country whose enemies know exactly how it works, because they helped design it. That’s the quiet horror behind the plot. Britain’s security infrastructure has been privatised, outsourced, and rendered ideologically legible to adversaries who operate within the same global systems. The GRU doesn’t need to hack DeepSpear, they just need to understand how capitalism and secrecy intersect. The real breach isn’t technical. It’s structural.
“Everything you touch turns to shit. Maybe Zoe’s better off without you.”
These novels worship the Regiment. They mythologise men who kill cleanly, suffer stoically, and drink alone. But they rarely, if ever, reckon with the reality: that soldiers like Hawkins and Jock, in the real world, have left trails of civilian blood. British special forces have been credibly accused of war crimes—from Afghanistan to Iraq—yet in thrillers like Second Strike, that violence is sanitised, repurposed, given narrative justification. No villagers die. No prisoners scream. Those killed Atrocity is not denied. It simply isn’t mentioned. These are books that honour the shadow war without naming its victims.
When you finish the last page, you aren’t going to remember any of this. But maybe that’s the point. These books are part of the machine. They teach us how to love the men who pull the trigger, and forget the world that made them necessary. And in the final pages of Second Strike, the real question is left hanging: who was the mole at the top? The book circles it, implies, suggests, but never confirms. In that silence is a truth more unsettling than any shoot-out. The threat isn’t just in Russia or rogue agents. The war is being lost from within.
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