STEVE JACKSON – The Judas. Harper, UK, paperback original (*), 2007.

   Well, “ha ha” on me, you might say. After carrying on a short while ago about reading the third book in a trilogy without reading the first two first — and being miffed when it didn’t turn out all that well — here it is, that same short while later, and I’ve done it again. Kind of.

   What’s different is that there’s only one book in this series before this one, The Mentor (Harper, 2006), and I knew about before starting this one. But the blurb on the back cover didn’t bring it up, and usually, you know, you can read a crime novel without reading the one before it, and even if the story line does depend a bit on the previous one, you can usually pick it up as you go along.

   Except when you can’t, of course, as that previous example goes a long way to prove.

   But that’s not the problem. I was OK with all that on this one. I was able to fill in what I’d missed without all that much difficulty. It turns out, though, that the end of the previous book wasn’t the end, after all. When The Judas begins, MI6 agent Paul Aston’s former mentor is in jail for the crimes he committed in the previous book.

   He got caught, and he’s about to go on trial, a fact that doesn’t immediately connect up to the story that The Judas is nominally about, but if you were to guess, I think you’d agree that it is highly likely that it will.

   In The Judas, someone is killing off a short list of retired agents in Europe, and Aston is assigned the case, along with George Strauss, who happens to be female, and who has worked with Aston before. (All agents have to have female colleagues with whom they work on cases together on in recent years, or hadn’t you noticed?)

   There is a lot more to tell – there are nearly 500 pages in The Judas – but here is where the “ha ha” on me comes in. The story does not end at the end of The Judas. It is only the second of three.

   Or at least there was supposed to have been three. Things are in a bad way at the end of this one, leaving lots of loose ends to be gathered up in book three, The Watcher, which was supposedly to appear in 2008. The author’s website was last updated in 2009, and here it is three years later, and the book still isn’t out.

   Ha ha, indeed. And it isn’t as though I found The Judas particularly well written. The characters are one-dimensional, the story is padded (necessarily so with almost 500 pages to fill), and the writing seldom exceeds what is high school level in the US. The story is not uninteresting, but even so, a book without an ending? I don’t know what happened, but at the moment, you’re better off not starting this one — not at least without being warned.

(*) FOOTNOTE:   My copy is a paperback, and it definitely says “paperback original” inside. On the other hand, there are hardcover editions you can purchase on ABE and from Amazon-UK, so I may be in error about this. Perhaps you should not believe all you read.