As in all his novels, Seymour focuses on the everyman foot soldier torn between the enemy before him and the high-ranking diplomats at his back. Charlie Webster is a world-weary counter-terrorism expert who has been called away from his soft desk job to negotiate with the hijackers. Gripping, explosive, yet still fully human, Kingfisher demonstrates the concept that elevates all of Seymour's stories: victory in multinational political conflicts is quite often Pyrrhic at the personal level.