THE WILD ONE

After stumbling on a cache of videos revealing a shadowy group working to control the government, a security expert is murdered, her husband becomes the suspect, and damaged vet Peter Ash is called in to find the couple's missing son.

Ash's client is the dead woman's mother. When she tells him she believes her son-in-law has taken her grandson and fled to his native Iceland, Ash heads there to make contact with the suspect's family, who he believes are hiding him. It doesn't take long for Ash to become convinced that the fugitive husband is not the killer and to figure out that some American government officials are determined to stop his investigation. Crime fiction is almost routinely too long these days, but even in that context this story feels, at 400 pages, much too long. Petrie (Tear It Down, 2019, etc.) is aiming at the combination of procedural and physical action that characterized Lee Child's Jack Reacher series. Ash, an Iraqi veteran who suffers from PTSD, is clearly modeled on Reacher, but a tormented Reacher, and torment doesn't have nearly the appeal that smartass wit does. The book is unrelievedly grim. The violence, when it comes, is sadistic and prolonged (and the scenes in which that violence is witnessed by a child are very unpleasant). Worse, the book mutes the satisfaction of seeing the bad guys get theirs in favor of a kind of hopeless cynicism.

Brutality, cynicism, and the frozen landscapes of Iceland. Not the most winning combo.