When a member of the Little Brown Book Group publishing team offered me an opportunity to read this new novel by Tom Wood, I wasn’t sure if I would enjoy an espionage/assassination crime thriller. But how wrong was I - I loved it !!

This is a taut, action-driven thriller that plunges the reader into the shadowy world of assassins and covert operations, but it’s so much more than that. This is storytelling at its finest. The sub stories within the main plot are captivating and complex, and there’s never a dull moment in this action-packed thriller with a well-constructed ending.

Told in seven parts and in short, snappy chapters, No Good Deed is book 14 of The Victor Assassin Series, which follows Victor, a highly skilled freelance assassin caught up in a dangerous, international mission. However, when he decides to pursue a personal agenda to pay back a debt, what begins as a seemingly straightforward assignment soon unleashes a chain of catastrophic events and Victor is driven to finish what he started, no matter the consequences.

The characters are well thought out and diverse, while the protagonist, who operates outside conventional moral boundaries is an absolute dream of a character. The friendship between Victor and Barbara McCalla adds warmth and grounding, as do the snippets of humour throughout, and I’m hoping Scragg, the Kashmiri Scottish Viking, who sounds both intriguing and enigmatic, pops up in other books in the series, as I would like to read more about him.

No Good Deed is a good choice if you enjoy action-driven thrillers with a strong espionage element, rather than traditional police procedurals. Don’t worry if you haven’t read any of the previous books in this fantastic series, as this works equally well as a standalone, but I now want to delve back into the murky, amoral world of Victor and find out what else he gets up to, as I don’t want to say goodbye to this compelling character.

Thanks to NetGalley and Little Brown Book Group publishers for the ARC.