Broken Hero by Jonathan Wood Review

Arthur Wallace is back with MI37, and this time he’s got a simple matter of some Nazi-built robots to deal with, some of which are hell-bent on ending most of humanity with a fairly hefty bomb. The fourth book in the Hero series, Broken Hero picks up not long after Anti Hero ended. The team are, in their current state, still plugging away with trying to rid the world of various magical bad guys and in their usual “sod it, that’ll do” manner are still coming frighteningly close to death by doing so. The initial encounter with a quite pissed off and quite enormous robot in a sleepy Scottish pub sets up a plot thread which runs throughout the book, dropping doubts into Arthur’s mind and making his mortality far more noticeable than he’d previously noticed. Later events (which I won’t ruin for you) bring that even further to the forefront of the story, and it all makes for an incredibly tense and emotional final few chapters as the story reaches its conclusion and some pretty shocking sequences are played out.

There’s a new girl too, Hannah, whose role is clouded in uncertainty for much of the book, but the new character gives some freshness to the team, with the unlikely bond between her and Kayla opening up a new side to her as well. Along with some mind-bending magic, it all comes together to form another excellent story which, even despite the odd feeling of American slang dropping into an Oxford based British government team, is incredibly easy to read and equally difficult to put down.

If you haven’t read these yet, go and get them all. You won’t be disappointed.