Two book reviews for the price of one
Posted on January 7, 2007
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I’ve just finished reading two throwaway thrillers and I thought I’d share my thoughts on them with you.
Stephen Leather’s Soft Target is a taut thriller and doesn’t really deserve the throwaway tag. The book contains three storylines that develop seperately for most of the book. Inevitably, these storylines do come together for an exciting finish in the final chapters. Briefly, Dan ‘Spider’ Shepard is a former SAS soldier who’s been recruited to be an undercover agent provocetaur for the police. He does his job extremely well and the book starts with an on-the-job example of his courage and tenacity. In fact, so good is he at his job that his next task (the major part of this book) is to target an elite group of armed police officers who may be corrupt. In addition to his professional duties, he is also a recent widower who has to sort out arrangements for his young boy. These three threads are all developed extrememly well and could stand on their own as mini-novellas. That they spiral around each other until the final few chapters where these seemingly separate stories come together is testamount to the author’s storytelling skills.
I really liked this book by Stephen Leather and I’ll be looking out for his other books. One quibble and it’s nothing to do with the author. The author’s name is in very large type on the front of the book and the title is so small that it’s almost an afterthought. It’s a shame they’re advertising the author more than the story within but I guess that’s the modern art of selling books.
Ambush by Paul Carson is ok but it is a throwaway thriller. First, I must declare a bias. This book is set in Dublin and I always have a hard time dealing with books set in Dublin. I don’t know whether it’s the dialogue or the characterisations but it never seems to be realistic to be. But then I have lived outside of Dublin for a good ten years so what do I know?
In this book, the two main characters are the ‘brilliant’ doctor and the hard-bitten detective. The unusually attractive doctor with poor social skills is married to the beautiful sister of the chain-smoking, leather jacket-wearing detective. When the wife/sister is brutally murdered in error by an unknown psychopathic drug dealer, the two of them must forget past animosities and join together to catch the killer of the innocent woman they loved so much. So far, so good as a storyline.
But some of the plot devices used to move the story along grated with me. In one section of the story, they use an outbuilding in Garda HQ in the Phoenix Park as a base for one part of their crusade. I won’t reveal much more but it is not credible that this would happen. Why the ‘mad, bad, and dangerous to know‘ detective couldn’t find a safe house or squat to use is beyond me. In several parts of the book, the attractive doctor is always pushing his glasses back up his nose or taking them off to wipe them as the nervous sweat clouds his vision. More than once, this is used to move the story along or to change direction and it’s not credible that a medical doctor would have such defective glasses. At the very least, his wife who worked in P.R. would have forced him to get better glasses. I wear glasses myself and I don’t know why this should bother me so much but it just does!
The oddest part of the book for me occurred when he returned to his parents in America after his wife dies. He’s just made his deal with the devil (the detective) so before he goes back to Ireland, he gets a makeover. By that, I mean, he gets new glasses and clothes that are entirely black. Somehow, this allows the author to make the good doctor tougher, and with a meaner accent. The detective thinks the good doctor is now tough. It just didn’t make sense to me as a way to move the story along. I’m going to see Casino Royale in the cinema later this evening and part of the story, I believe, is the genesis about how James Bond becomes a cold-blooded killer. In one of the trailers I’ve seen, Bond is asked does he like killing people and, in return, he says something like ‘I wouldn’t be very good at my job if I didn’t’. Both Carson’s book and the film are ficticious but I think I can guess which will stand the test of time!
Finally, I have to take issue with the author. Unlike Leather’s book, the medic Carson doesn’t have a ‘light touch’ when it comes to talking about guns, explosives, and medical drugs. Carson’s book could be better and much shorter if he didn’t feel the need to tell the reader the dimensions of certain guns etc.
In summary, then, read Carson’s book if you get it as a present (like I did) but don’t buy it.
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