The Last 10 Seconds

Tina Boyd #5

by Simon Kernick

The new race-against-time bestseller from the British Harlan Coben.

When ex-police officer John Cone is found lying wounded in a room full of dead bodies, he has a terrifying story to tell.

Three days earlier he was hired by a mysterious client to snatch a suspected serial killer, Andrew Kent (aka the Penthouse Predator) from custody while he's being transferred between prisons. Kent is snatched, but then things immediately go wrong. People start dying, Kent goes missing, and Cone begins to realize that the case against him is not what he was led to believe.

Sharing that suspicion is newly promoted DI Tina Boyd, one of the murder squad team who arrested Kent several months earlier. But now Kent's disappeared, and Tina has to find him. And find him fast, because it's clear some very high-powered people want to silence him.

Genres: Thriller, Crime, Fiction, Mystery, Detective, Ebooks, Mystery Thriller

368 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2010

About the author

Simon Kernick (born 1966 in Slough, Berkshire) is a British thriller/crime writer now living in Oxfordshire with his wife and two daughters. He attended Gillotts School, a comprehensive in Henley-on-Thames, Oxfordshire. Whilst he was a student his jobs included fruitpicker and Christmas-tree uprooter. He graduated from Brighton Polytechnic in 1991 with a degree in humanities. Kernick had a passion for crime fiction writing from a young age and produced many short stories during his time at polytechnic. After graduating Kernick joined MMT Computing in London in early 1992, where a relative was the Chairman and Managing Director. Kernick was a key member of the sales team and was very highly regarded. However, he left the company after 4 years in the hope of trying to secure a publishing deal. Despite interest from a number of publishers Kernick was unable to secure a deal, so he joined the sales force of the specialist IT and Business Consultancy Metaskil plc in Aldermaston, Berkshire in 1998 where he remained until he secured his first book deal (The Business of Dying) in September 2001. His novel Relentless was recommended on Richard & Judy's Summer book club 2007. It was the 8th best-selling paperback, and the best-selling thriller in the UK in the same year

Reviews

[Lainy · Rating 5 out of 5]

LOVED LOVED LOVED this book!

Synopsis
36 hours ago a serial killer is arrested on the streets of North London after a two year reign of terror. Known as the Night Creeper, hes earned his reputation by torturing 5 young women to death.

24 hours ago undercover cop Sean Egan has infiltrated one of the country's most nototrious criminal gangs. Now he is about to risk his life in a desperate bid to bring its members to justice.

12 hours ago DI Tina Boyd has discovered that the Night Creeper's murders are part of a much larger criminal conspiracy. But the quest for the truth has brought her into contact with some very dangerous people who want to silence her - permanently.

The last 10 seconds A man, A woman and a serial killer. As they race towards a terrifying confrontation only one thing is certain: they are all going to have to fight very hard to stay alive.

Absolutely fantastic page turner, right from the beginning your drawn in. One chapter follows DI Tina Boyd, the next Sean Egan as they both tackle their cases and try to get to the bottom of their investigation/undercover op.

Breath stopping, heart racing and left constantly on the edge of your seat. Just when you think you have it figured out something changes and your left guessing. When one mystery is finally solved there comes another twist in the plot.

Possibly my favourite book of his so far (although I lost some sleep hours as I had to finish it which kept me up into the wee hours of the morning). 5/5 for me

[Sibel Gandy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ha gayret. Bir sonraki kitapta Tina Boyd' u tek ana karakter olarak görebileceğiz inşallah 🤭

[Lukasz Pruski · Rating 1 out of 5]

What a disappointment! Simon Kernick’s “The Last 10 Seconds” is a very bad novel. After wonderful “The Business of Dying” (4 stars) and good “Crime Trade” and “The Murder Exchange” (3 stars both), there comes this horrid clunker.

“The Last 10 Seconds” is so poorly written that it became a dreaded page-turner for me. I was turning pages fast wanting to end the butchery of language as fast as possible. I am afraid Mr. Kernick, now a well-established author of thrillers, does not have time or energy to write the text of the novel himself any more. He probably dictates the plot to some aspiring writer who picks it up from there.

The beginning of the novel has an intriguing setup but then the plot advances so fast that it is totally ridiculous. The twists and turns are contrived and utterly improbable. “The Last 10 seconds” is a non-stop action thriller of the worst kind.

In my review of Mr. Kernick’s “The Business of Dying” (a really good book, except for the last 100 “action-packed” pages) I was making fun of the main character’s ability to miraculously regain strength. Guess what, the main character here often uses “the last vestiges of strength” to regain full strength.

One and a half stars (the half is for the really interesting premise, which could become a fabulous book).

[Lisa · Rating 4 out of 5]

What can i say this book started off well but fell flat in the middle was a bit slow for me in parts Missed a lot of info about Tina Boyd as it was a library loan so may try to read the first in this series to try & catch up

[Andy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Absolutely loved this book,
but am i reading the right one?
It says in the preview here that the guys name is John when it`s Sean and he`s not an ex-copper he is an undercover cop.
Also the killer is not known as the Penthouse Prowler but the Night creeper.
However the book is awesome all the same and thoroughly deserves it`s 5 stars as do ALL Simon`s other books.
Thouroughly enjoyable hard to put down thrillers.

[Gary · Rating 5 out of 5]

An excellent novel from one of my favourite writers.
He writes such good original stories that have strong characters and believable plots.

[David Dalton · Rating 4 out of 5]

The last Simon Kernick novel that I read was in 2021. This thriller was my fifth Kernick novel, and I did start it on Dec 31, 2022. I have also read:
, , and . Loved them all, with Siege being my personnal favorite.

I picked up "The Last 10 Seconds" as a trade paperback (I am normally a Kindle junkie) and loved it. I immediately picked up two more Kernick thrillers in Kindle format: and . Plus I already had on my Kindle as well. I am set up pretty good for Simon Kernick stories.

The pace in this thriller was non-stop. From the frying pan into the fire! One thrill led to another. And Simon kept it going thru the whole novel. Simon and Stephen Leather are two of my favorite authors. And both from London. I will for sure read one of the Simon Kernick thrillers I have on hand soon, or go out and get (the plot just sounds so inticing).

[Squid McFinnigan · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book kept me interested and entertained: what else could I ask for?

Fair enough, I'm not sure any police officer acting like the main characters would last long in the real world, but this is not the real world. I like a book to take me out of the boring tedium of the every-day, and this sure did that.

So, if you are in the mood for a action packed romp through London, you won't go far wrong with this one.

[Alice · Rating 5 out of 5]

Well… What a page turner! This book had me on the edge of my seat!! I saw on Goodreads that Simon Kernick had good reviews for all his books, so I had high expectations, and this book certainly didn’t disappoint!! What a brilliant fast paced thriller!!! Excited to read more of his work.

[Melanie O'Neill · Rating 4 out of 5]

An absolutely excellent, fast paced, exciting read. Packed with action, tension and a great storyline. It's a while since I've read anything by this author but I will be certainly be hunting some more of his out now! Would definitely recommend.

[Alan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Picked up this book in a holiday home. Not heard of the author before, but really enjoyed the characters and coming together plot. Easy read, UK based crime drama. Definitely will now follow up on other books by this author

[Lynette · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great thriller, fast paced, wasn't based around detectives from 6 previous novels with back stories I didn't get because I haven't read them. Easy to follow, didn't guess everything early on. What's not to like? Not a masterpiece but a thoroughly enjoyable suspense novel.

[Jill Edmondson · Rating 3 out of 5]

An enjoyable roller coaster ride. Hard to put down. My only issue was that at times I had to suspend disbelief a bit more than I'd like (how many times can a person be shot at but NOT get critically hit?)

[ElaF · Rating 4 out of 5]

Audiobook
4 ⭐️

[Mads LC · Rating 4 out of 5]

read on my 2hr driving breaks on the way from germany 🇩🇪

[Julie Ward · Rating 5 out of 5]

Thoroughly enjoyed this, first one in the series I’ve read but going to read the others now!

[Best Crime Books & More · Rating 5 out of 5]

There are three people involved and none of them can predict just how dangerous things are going to turn out. DI Tina Boyd has a past that is littered with trouble and she just seems to attract it wherever she goes. She has been part of the team that has tracked down and now arrested the serial killer known as `The Night Creeper'. The only problem is he has now been kidnapped and it's Tina's job to hunt him down.

Sean Egan is an undercover cop who has managed to become embedded in a dangerous criminal gang posing as another gang member looking for work. He is roped in on a job that means kidnapping the serial killer known as `The Night Creeper'. What he doesn't realise is that he will be forced to make decisions that could not only end his career but his life too.

The Night Creeper is in custody arrested by DI Boyd. Not only is he a dangerous and sadistic killer but he is acting and looking like an innocent man. The reputation he has built was based on his brutality that all the police witnessed at each of the 5 murders that he committed. The only problem is, once in custody, he is claiming that he has a watertight alibi meaning that if he didn't commit one, then did he commit any.

OH MY GOD! There are so many words that I just can't find to explain this book. Corker, cracking, brilliant, exceptional, breathtaking, fast, edgy, the list goes on. What I will say is that this is a five star book that confirms that Simon Kernick deserves his place in the world of crime writing.

I have been an avid Crime and Thriller reader for the best part of 16 years and am shocked at the fact that I only discovered Kernick by reading Relentless a mere 8 months ago. Relentless was itself an absolute gem of a book (for which I rated it 5 out of 5) and I was pleased that I had read one of his books and planned on reading a lot more. Unfortunately for me my `to read' list was getting longer and Simon Kernick went to the back of my mind. That was until Tuesday of this week, when I wandered into a book shop, only to see his new release sitting there on the shelf. I grabbed it with earnest and placed it at the top of my list as it had been 8 months since I had read Relentless and wanted to see if this was as good as the last one. I needn't have worried as this book was, if possible, even better than Relentless. Hence the reason for the review a mere 2 days later!

With this authors genius style of writing it took me no more than one chapter to become engrossed. The story hits you in the gut from page one and doesn't give up until the very last page. It had all the ingredients of a crime book that any reader wants. Great meaty characters, all flawed in their own strange ways. A story that is paced so quickly you feel like you're in the passenger seat of a Formula One car, and to top it all off a story that takes you on more twists and turns than a roller-coaster ride.

The characters Sean and Tina are written extremely well in the first person and I loved the fact that the switch between the two was easy. Tina has her own demons, as does Sean which always helps towards the realism of a character in my opinion. They weren't picture perfect and both have the same streak for doing things their way, no matter what the cost, or what rules they have to break. The chapters weren't too long and were punchy and to the point.

The crime scenes themselves are written extremely graphically, which not to everybody's taste I understand, was completely relevant to the story and the type of violence that Sean and Tina were surrounded by.

I could find no flaws with this book and am already adding him to my pre-order list. I suggest that if you haven't read a book by Mr Kernick that you add him to your list now, you won't be disappointed.

[Chip · Rating 1 out of 5]

Mediocre at best. Laughingly convoluted and coincidental. And honestly, I can believe in an unarmed person being victorious against someone with a gun, but not basically every other chapter - especially one with a fractured rib and shot and bandaged leg on crutches. You don't throw your crutch at a man with a gun and then successfully charge and disarm him - you get shot in the face.

Stupid stupid stupid.

[KurdishBookworm · Rating 2 out of 5]

Detectives in Kernick 's books are so clumsy and annoying,
Everyone looks so fake and all characters are dumb
We can read such amateur police stories /failures on newspaper why write a book (or 7) about it.
Can they at least learn from experience? They kept falling and failing then making same mistakes all over again, it was hard to keep reading.

[Steve Emecz · Rating 4 out of 5]

Another dedicated shelf has to be created for Kernick in the house and my wife is getting annoyed. Coben, Crais, Connelly, and others dominate the shelves and now Kernick too. Fast paced and quite tough, excellent travelling on the tube fodder - in the re-visit later category too.

[Anthony Lynch · Rating 4 out of 5]

fast paced crime.

[Matt Hilton · Rating 4 out of 5]

Another top notch thriller from Simon Kernick

[David · Rating 5 out of 5]

non stop high paced action and tension

[Julie Marshall · Rating 5 out of 5]

Loved this book!! Fast paced. Action packed. Page turner. Highly recommended :))

[Rich Littlewood · Rating 1 out of 5]

Can't really understand the positive reviews of this book. Dan Brown's writing skills coupled with the excitement of a Harlan Coben paint-by-numbers story. Terrible

[Malika Rahmany · Rating 5 out of 5]

amazing

[Hilal Tunçkol · Rating 3 out of 5]

We get more and more Tina Boyd with each book, and I cannot say she is my favorite character, but it is still something.

In this book, there was a serial killer, Andrew Kent, who media calls the Night Crawler, and the book starts with a fast paced scene in which Kent is captured. We learn that this murderer r*ped and k*lled five women. Apparently Andrew Kent installed security systems in these women's houses, and after sometime, he went back to kill them. Andrew rejects all allegations, though. And as evidence, he says that when the fourth victim, a young woman named Roisin was murdered, he was at his father's funeral.

Police sees the he is right and they are confused. They investigate, but in the meantime, someone poisons Andrew, and some people abduct him on his way to the hospital. It is a gang that was paid by some anonymous man, and a civil police, Sean is also a member of the team, because one of the other members killed his brother and Sean wants revenge.

It is fine until this point, but there aren't any surprising incidents, no twists in the book. For instance, Tina's boss tells Sean that the same people abducted his son, and because of it, he had to help them Andrew Kent. But it is revealed suddenly, out of nowhere. There is no surprise element, and since I don't really know this guy or his son, it is difficult for me to care about them.

As for the rest, Tina easily comes up with a theory, and guess what? It is exactly what happened. She isn't wrong about anything, which takes a lot away from the surprise element, as well.

SPOILERS AHEAD

And what happened was that Andrew was indeed the Night Crawler, but he really didn't kill Roisin. Roisin had an affair with a minister. The minister was married and he wanted to end the affair for the future of his career, but Roisin didn't want that and they had a fight. The minister ended up killing Roisin, and he was so panicked that he wanted help from Paul Wise. Yes, the same Paul Wise again, who is living in Cyprus now, apparently. Wise sent a namen nicknamed Alpha to handle the incident, and Alpha made it look like one of Night Crawler's killings. Tina understood this and faced the minister, but when the minister's wife found out, the woman killed both herself and her husband. Sean uncovered the identity of Alpha; he was his boss, actually, a man named Captain Bob. In the end, the gangster who captured Andrew and Captain Bob all died, Sean survived and was at peace, finally. And Tina mamanged solve another case, with the help of Mike Bolt.

And I understand that Tina is supposed to be a good detective, but I would still prefer some trial and error, and a more gradual resolution to the case, instead of people coming clean at once.

[the judgy reader · Rating 1 out of 5]

Three reasons to read The Last 10 Seconds:

1) I enjoy this style of storytelling that begins at the end and then skips back to the beginning. It works especially well with the crime genre.

2) The procedural side of the story is well-researched, as are the action scenes, which are well-thought-out and believable.

3) It does a decent job of creating intellectual curiosity and making readers read on just to see how it plays out.

Six drawbacks to The Last 10 Seconds:

1) I don't know if it's the crime genre in general or just the books I've read, but the writing is so bland. No wonderful descriptions, no great turns of phrase, no life to any of the scenes. "Derval looked utterly shocked" – that's how most of it is written: basic information that forces readers to do all the work of figuring out exactly how this character must look.

2) The dialogue is awful, repetitive, and unrealistic.

3) The author wants his main characters to be mavericks. They try very hard to be cool while pretending they don't try at all. They're the only ones who see things clearly; others insist it's all a coincidence and not worth looking into. If the only way you can make your characters seem competent is by making everyone else incompetent, you've already lost.

4) The bad guys are cardboard cutouts. There's no character development anywhere, and I have zero emotional attachment to any of them. They could all die horribly, and I wouldn't care.

5) The methods used to increase tension are cheap: lights going out to hide an attacker's identity for a few extra pages, ending chapters on cliffhangers that miss the mark (e.g. "Kent (...) looked up at me (...) and said something very strange indeed."), a scene that was supposed to last 30 seconds taking up 3 or 4 chapters because the author wanted to switch back and forth between POVs, etc.

6) If the only way the author found to make the crime interesting and unexpected was to make it convoluted, unrealistic, and unreasonable, perhaps crime fiction was not the best genre for him.

[Laila · Rating 4 out of 5]

Why is my book 473 pages long?? Please update it in here!


Okay so now let me rumble about the book but before that, the title no where makes sense not even a bit, so if you want to read it just go without knowing much about it and not on the fact that it has something to do with last 10 seconds.

It was a good read but too stretched out to reach a sixty two chapter's book. The plot was from okay to good as the earlier chapters already gave it away too much about who was providing the info what was left to do was just unmask the info provider and bam done but some how it still took long for the author (I mean 62 chapter long) to do so.

Also, The Billy thing was unrequired for in my opinion it could have been much better if it was Tina instead of Billy.

The characters were well built but again not much of a wow factor in the book for those who ain't amateur crime mystery readers. There are short to medium books with a great plot available too. This was my first time reading this author's book but I hope he doesn't always write these many chapters in a book. I found this one in my college library and thought to go for it without knowing much about it.

Anyways I'm still in a dilemma whether to rate it 3 stars or let it be as it. Let me settle on 3.5 🌟 I guess that seems fair.

[Rog Harrison · Rating 2 out of 5]

I have enjoyed most of the author's books but this one was so outrageous that I struggled to willingly suspend my disbelief. Much of the story is told from the first person perspective of Sean Egan, a maverick undercover police officer, but Tina Boyd, now promoted to Detective Inspector, also plays a major role. The book starts with Tina tracking down a serial killer but takes a twist when she discovers that the killer has an alibi for one of the murders which had been attributed to him. Things get further complicated when the gang which Sean has infiltrated try to free the killer from police custody. Needless to say before the end of the book a lot of people have died. Although over the top there are a few interesting twists and turns so this is not a bad read. If you are familiar with the author's style you may like this but if you are not this is definitely not the place to start.