TROUBLESHOOTER

Rackley rides again (The Kill Clause, 2003, etc.) in a first-rate thriller about bikers gone bad.

Bikers are not all bad. In fact, 99% are unreservedly law-abiding, reasonably respectable—in short, pussycats miscast as villains. It’s the remaining 1% who mix menace with their big machines and—whether from drugs, prostitution or highway robbery—derive plunder as they thunder. One-percenters, they call themselves defiantly. Among these it’s entirely possible the Laughing Sinners are the nastiest who ever threw a leg over a Hog. Which makes Sinner president Den Laurey a piece of work only monsters could love. And they do. As he is being driven by armed guards to the federal penitentiary, a covey of his fellow Sinners plan a daring ambush to rescue their leader. It works—Laurey is sprung, two U.S. deputy marshals are killed. “Get Rackley,” says boss Marshall Tannino, both enraged and beset as media pressure begins building almost at once. Deputy Rackley hates bad guys out of long-held conviction. Laurey provides him with a reason: He guns down Rackley’s pregnant wife, a deputy sheriff who makes the serious mistake of attempting to recapture Laurey single-handedly. Hospitalized, comatose, she and her baby cling to life while Rackley, duty-bound, intensifies the chase. Clever and ambitious as he is brutal and corrupt, Laurey has his Sinners deeply involved in a multinational, multimillion dollar drug-smuggling scheme with links to Islamic terrorists.

Competently written and plotted, but it’s the righteously resolute Rackley you pay your money for, and he doesn’t disappoint.