Master of crime fiction puts targeted killing at heart of political thriller

“You may as well,” says author Jeffery Deaver when I ask him if it’s ok to record our conversation. “It’s all going back to GCHQ, and to the NSA and CIA anyway. Especially with this book.”

The comment is delivered with Deaver’s dust-dry sense of humour, and sounds rather strange in the plush environs of the Merrion Hotel’s reception rooms, but he makes a valid point. The Kill Room is a very timely novel indeed — “oddly prescient” is how Deaver describes it — which engages with some very contemporary headlines.