THE PRINCE OF DEADLY WEAPONS

A third violent vengeance-thriller from Teran (Never Count Out the Dead, 2001, etc.), larded with one-dimensional characters and written in pretentious, occasionally incomprehensible pseudo-lit prose.

While waiting on a New York City subway platform at two in the morning—“That's when you get to experience the other side of the other side”—young Dane Rudd has the course of his life drastically altered by an act of mindless cruelty. Someone riding between two cars of an express train hurls a glass at his face and hits him with a blend of chemicals potent enough to rob him of most of his eyesight. Flash to young Taylor Green in Rio Vista, California. In a manner of speaking he too is soon to have a life-altering experience: he's about to be murdered. Quite by accident, Taylor has become privy to a desperate secret concerning the covert activities of some of his friends and neighbors, rich movers and shakers as reputable as they are unscrupulous. He knows that they know he knows about the money-laundering and drug-pushing, and all know their response will be swift and remorseless. Taylor's abrupt demise is brazenly camouflaged as suicide, but brave, bereaved Essie Law, the young woman who loved him, refuses to be hornswoggled. Reenter Dane, freshly kitted out with cornea transplants from Taylor, to aid and abet Essie. Though beaten frequently and tortured inhumanly, he eventually proves that Taylor was victimized, gets revenge on his killers, heals Essie's fractured heart, and gains redemption for himself, having become a changed and better person through such Zenlike insights as: “The con man and the honest man suffer in the end the same, for they are forever in jeopardy from themselves as well as others.” Knowledge is power.

Pulpy, purple, and essentially plotless.