THE EXILE

Bloated international thriller, knee-deep in cops, rogues, and Romanovs, starts fast—and stumbles.

But what a riveting curtain-raiser: an elite LAPD squad—young John Barron its newest member—pursues a mad-dog killer named Raymond Thorne. In the aftermath of this vividly rendered and bloody gunfight—Folsom (Day of Confession, 1998, etc.) can flat-out write an action scene—John is asked to do something he considers beyond the pale, and his refusal turns his life around. Suddenly, he’s persona non grata with certain lynch-minded members of the LAPD, so much so that he’s forced to flee to London, taking with him his 19-year-old sister Rebecca, an emotional basket case as the result of a psyche-shattering hit suffered when she was a child. John sets her up in London’s excellent Balmore Clinic, then wastes no time falling in love with Clementine Simpson, the rich, titled, incredibly sexy Englishwoman he meets there. Encouraged by her, John (Nick now) discovers in himself a latent inclination toward—um. . . landscape gardening, enrolls at the University of Manchester, and settles down to pursue a course. Rebecca, meanwhile, has so fully recovered her health that she learns to speak French, Italian, Spanish, and Russian—in five months! Ah, if only the repellent Raymond Thorne could remain as dead as everyone has assumed he was. But, no, surgically reconstructed, he reappears with hitherto-unsuspected connections that tie him directly to that sturdiest of Russian royal family mysteries. (If you’re thinking Anastasia, you’re wrong but not by a lot.) Inevitably, Raymond and John-Nick meet in hand-to-hand combat, with the fate of loved ones and a dark, dreary, very Russian conspiracy hanging in the balance.

Take away the action scenes—surprisingly few for all these pages—and what’s left is a collection of cartoony characters and some head-scratching plot elements.