Author Description

Following on from where Bridges Going Nowhere and The Threat Beneath left off, From The Shadows embarks on a darker voyage. It takes the reader from an emboldened Hamas in the Gaza Strip to Sweden in far-off Scandinavia. The physical distance between the two stands in stark contrast to their sometimes startling similarity of attitudes and demographics. And wherever the action plays out, there is a newly revived Iranian regime pulling the strings.Ilya Meyer lives in both Sweden and Israel, having previously spent many years in a kibbutz near the Gaza Strip. A lot of research has gone into the fine details of the story - people's names, roads, the inside line on the various security services involved, the technologies depicted in the book that are so crucial to the storyline.As before, a lot of effort has gone into deliberately muddying the waters so that this element of transparency, of traceability, does not go too far and jeopardise security. Crucial details are therefore deliberately inaccurate or entirely incorrect, a figment of the author's imagination.Along with the fast pace of the action and the in-depth political analysis, Ilya Meyer brings a constant undercurrent of dry, bubbling humour in telling his tale, a down-to-earth sense of fun in spotlighting foibles of characters co-existing in unease and sometimes downright antipathy. The conflicts between various ethnic groups and between various religious ideologies depicted in the book are unfortunately all too real, but as in real life they also occasionally give rise to dry humour.As before, significant portions of the storyline had to be rewritten as the fiction around which the action centres began to be reported in the media as ongoing news.This final book in The Hart Trilogy is darker than the previous two, in line with the author's intention. The trilogy is intended to be viewed as a whole, embodying something of a cognitive journey from somewhat mild beginnings through darker insights and into an almos