Slick, moody stuff, with a plot that slips out of memory even as the pages turn.
No matter how hard this assassin tries to get out, they pull him back in.
John Rain is a half-American, half-Japanese hit man (Rain Fall, 2002), but there’s little reason to know anything about him, not even his name, as he so completely fulfills the requirements of his particular type. Because he’s a Hit Man, we know that he experienced violence at a young age (serving in Vietnam) and later went on his own as a freelance killer With Scruples, of course (no women, no children, and no secondary victims, only the principal). He leads what seems to be a pretty nice life in Japan: luxury high-rise apartment, plenty of disposable cash, a flexible work schedule that leaves him oodles of time to hang out in classy jazz joints and dream about retiring to Brazil. But, naturally, real life intrudes on John’s idyll, this time in the form of Tatsu, a policeman friend who wants some help (he’ll pay, of course) investigating a man who’s running a circuit of illegal underground fights (no real suspense on whether martial arts master John will eventually be called upon to take part in one of those fights). At the same time, the CIA, which still has a grudge with John from his previous outing, approaches him about helping with a program charmingly called Crepuscular, which involves taking a high-speed detour around the corruption grinding the Japanese economy to a halt by taking out impediments to reform. It’s unfortunate that Eisler has to introduce a story, actually, because there’s really nothing to the novel but Rain. Hard-boiled down to the ice-cold core of his survival-oriented soul, he’s not much more than a machine, but expertly engineered at that, and fascinating to watch in action. He’ll likely develop a decent-sized and loyal following with this series.
Slick, moody stuff, with a plot that slips out of memory even as the pages turn.Pub Date: July 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-399-15052-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2003
A suspenseful, professional-grade north country procedural whose heroine, a deft mix of compassion and attitude, would be...
Box takes another break from his highly successful Joe Pickett series (Stone Cold, 2014, etc.) for a stand-alone about a police detective, a developmentally delayed boy, and a package everyone in North Dakota wants to grab.
Cassandra Dewell can’t leave Montana’s Lewis and Clark County fast enough for her new job as chief investigator for Jon Kirkbride, sheriff of Bakken County. She leaves behind no memories worth keeping: her husband is dead, her boss has made no bones about disliking her, and she’s looking forward to new responsibilities and the higher salary underwritten by North Dakota’s sudden oil boom. But Bakken County has its own issues. For one thing, it’s cold—a whole lot colder than the coldest weather Cassie’s ever imagined. For another, the job she turns out to have been hired for—leading an investigation her new boss doesn’t feel he can entrust to his own force—makes her queasy. The biggest problem, though, is one she doesn’t know about until it slaps her in the face. A fatal car accident that was anything but accidental has jarred loose a stash of methamphetamines and cash that’s become the center of a battle between the Sons of Freedom, Bakken County’s traditional drug sellers, and MS-13, the Salvadorian upstarts who are muscling in on their territory. It’s a setup that leaves scant room for law enforcement officers or for Kyle Westergaard, the 12-year-old paperboy damaged since birth by fetal alcohol syndrome, who’s walked away from the wreck with a prize all too many people would kill for.
A suspenseful, professional-grade north country procedural whose heroine, a deft mix of compassion and attitude, would be welcome to return and tie up the gaping loose end Box leaves. The unrelenting cold makes this the perfect beach read.Pub Date: July 28, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-58321-7
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Minotaur
Review Posted Online: April 21, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2015
Proficient but eminently predictable. Amid all the time shifts and embedded backstories, the most surprising feature is how...
A convicted killer’s list of five people he wants dead runs the gamut from the wife he’s already had murdered to franchise heroine Ali Reynolds.
Back in the day, women came from all over to consult Santa Clarita fertility specialist Dr. Edward Gilchrist. Many of them left his care happily pregnant, never dreaming that the father of the babies they carried was none other than the physician himself, who donated his own sperm rather than that of the handsome, athletic, disease-free men pictured in his scrapbook. When Alexandra Munsey’s son, Evan, is laid low by the kidney disease he’s inherited from his biological father and she returns to Gilchrist in search of the donor’s medical records, the roof begins to fall in on him. By the time it’s done falling, he’s serving a life sentence in Folsom Prison for commissioning the death of his wife, Dawn, the former nurse and sometime egg donor who’d turned on him. With nothing left to lose, Gilchrist tattoos himself with the initials of five people he blames for his fall: Dawn; Leo Manuel Aurelio, the hit man he’d hired to dispose of her; Kaitlyn Todd, the nurse/receptionist who took Dawn’s place; Alex Munsey, whose search for records upset his apple cart; and Ali Reynolds, the TV reporter who’d helped put Alex in touch with the dozen other women who formed the Progeny Project because their children looked just like hers. No matter that Ali’s been out of both California and the news business for years; Gilchrist and his enablers know that revenge can’t possibly be served too cold. Wonder how far down that list they’ll get before Ali, aided once more by Frigg, the methodical but loose-cannon AI first introduced in Duel to the Death (2018), turns on them?
Proficient but eminently predictable. Amid all the time shifts and embedded backstories, the most surprising feature is how little the boundary-challenged AI, who gets into the case more or less inadvertently, differs from your standard human sidekick with issues.Pub Date: April 2, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5011-5101-9
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Feb. 18, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
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