Only the murder requires Sal's investigative skills (Sal otherwise turns up when notified and tries to follow the stalker, but does no more). Luke Wallace is a teenager, who was out clubbing, unable to recall now how his mate Ahktar Khan, had been stabbed in an alleyway. (As an indication of life in present-day Manchester, Luke cannot recall anything because he had been drinking and taking drugs - not the police nor Sal nor his parents are interested in how he obtained the drugs). Sal becomes increasingly dubious of the evidence provided by a couple of alleged eye-witnesses - quite reasonably she doubts the likelihood of a couple of middle-aged Hindus going to a rave, which must be pretty low in any one's estimation, and she discovers that the witnesses are related to the dead boy.
In turn, Sal works through the family links to discover a drugs network and a dead gone wrong. He discovery puts her life in jeopardy. And the chase brings her back to the door of her original suicide.
Not the stalker but an innocent man suffers from Sal's identification of the stalker's home address, and in a final chapter summing up the murder case, it is clear that for all an innocent lad being freed from jail, life is not much better. Not so much Madchester, as Sadchester.
Don't be put off by a rather tacky title. FIRE HAWK is a thriller with tight plotting, and little emphasis on high-tech gadgetry or sex. And though there is violence, even torture, it is played down.
Sam Packer is a British agent, captured in Baghdad, but then, surprisingly, freed and flown to Jordan, where MI5 get him back to Britain. Packer is first de-briefed, by his ex-mistress and continuing wife of his boss. In fact, Packer and Christine Taylor de-brief for a quick bout of sex, but this becomes part of the plot later on - not only because she is now pregnant, but because it reveals that she bears an enigmatic tattoo.
Meanwhile, all around the eastern Mediterranean, things are happening. In Iraq we follow UNSCOM beginning to look for biological weapons. They look closer because Packer has been warned that anthrax could be in the air, but this could be dis-information, and we do not know if the anthrax plotting is part of the schemes of Saddam Hussein, or of some independent gang. But in Saddam's Iraq can there be any plots of which he is not aware?
And what is happening in the Ukraine? Major Mikhail Pushkin is a good soldier, worried about the disappearance of a complete rocket from "the 39th Supply Regiment for which he was the second-in-command". He is more worried still when the quartermaster staff under him start dying.
And what is happening on Cyprus? On Cyprus Christine Taylor dies in anaphylactic shock after eating a peanut. Quickly Sam decides that Chrissie was forced to eat the nut and that her death is part of some larger plot. When he sees photographs taken in her hotel, Sam starts to put names to faces. And some of those names are Ukrainian.
Israel and the USA come into it, too, as the plotters try to put their anthrax in their rocket.
By cross-cutting between the different characters and nations, and by Packer's investigation of the complications in the life of Christine Taylor (she was an adulteress, she was a lesbian, and then some), Archer keeps the tension rising. In fact, he has so much plot and tension that he has to have two separate climaxes - one to bring down the rocket, and the other to comprehend Christine's death. Though I had some doubts about Archer's technical detail, I read on quickly, pleased that he could maintain a plot.