Tag: Thomas & Mercer

Review: Ruthless by John Rector + Giveaway

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | B Reviews> blog tours> book reviews> Giveaways
ruthless by john rectorFormat read: ebook provided by the publisher via NetGalley
Formats available: paperback, ebook, audiobook
Genre: mystery/thriller
Length: 270 pages
Publisher: Thomas & Mercer
Date Released: June 1, 2015
Purchasing Info: Author’s Website, Publisher’s Website, Goodreads, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Book Depository

Nick White is the only person who can save Abigail Pierce. After uncovering a plot to have her killed, he attempts to warn her but instead puts himself squarely in the crosshairs. They know who he is, they know where he lives, they know how to get at his family.

Drawn into the conspiracy surrounding Abigail, Nick soon discovers the danger is bigger than he ever believed. Now he must uncover the truth to save her and himself.

My Review:

duke city hit by max austinRuthless reminded me a lot of The Dismantling by Brian DeLeeuw (reviewed here) and Max Austin’s Duke City series (Duke City Split and Duke City Hit, reviewed here and here).

Why? Because in all these cases the protagonist is a guy who ends up involved in basically two-bit crimes. He’s not evil, he doesn’t intend to become a career criminal, but he just takes the easy way out one time too often and finds himself on the wrong side of the law and in way over his head.

Also, in both Dismantling and Ruthless, the poor schlub is misled by a woman who he wants to believe is basically innocent, and turns out to be anything but.

Ruthless also takes a surprising turn into lab-based science fiction, but we’ll get there in a minute.

At the beginning of the story, Nick White is at his regular bar, talking to his regular bartender and feeling regularly sorry for himself. His wife is over him because he keeps gambling, and often losing. Even worse, he gambled away their savings – and her trust. It’s not clear whether Nick is addicted to gambling, or if he’s just good enough at it that he generally walks away ahead – just not ahead enough.

His life is basically on the skids when he decides to play a prank on a drunk woman who walks into the bar. She thinks he’s the person she was planning to meet. It’s only after she staggers away that he opens up the manila envelope she left him. (Why is it always a manila envelope?)

The lady was expecting to meet a hitman, to contract with the guy to off her step-daughter. Because Nick’s luck is running true-to-form, meaning bad, the real hitman walks in as Nick is skulking out, and the really bad guy figures out who Nick is and what he has let himself in for.

Nick’s life goes all downhill from that point. Not that it had far to roll.

He should call the police and turn the evidence over to them. Instead, he decides to warn the intended victim.

Abigail Pierce looks like innocence personified. When the bad guys show up and start cutting her, Nick will do anything they say – and anything Abigail says, to keep her, and himself, and his soon-to-be-ex-wife, and possibly his dad, from being murdered.

He should have run as fast as he could, and left Abigail to her well-deserved fate. By the time he figures things out, he’s much, much too late to save anyone – including himself.

Escape Rating B-: At first, it just seems like Nick is out of luck and over his head. After his initial mistake, he keeps trying to do the right thing. It’s only as he gets deeper in to the quagmire that he finally figures out that everyone on all sides is using him.

He doesn’t even know what it is he is being used for. Poor schlub.

For all of Nick’s faults, and he has a bunch, he can’t see through Abigail’s innocent act, and he can’t believe that everyone is lying to him all the way around. For a guy who supposedly makes a living as a gambler, he does a lousy job of reading everyone’s tells.

dismantling by brian deleeuwAt first, this story seemed pretty familiar – it was a better written version of the story in The Dismantling. Nick gets sucked in to a life of crime, or at least a life on the run, by trying to save a woman who doesn’t really need saving. What made this one different is what he finally discovers he is saving Abigail for, or from. Or not.

Abigail and her stepmother appear to be fighting over the estate of a wealthy industrialist, the man they have in common. The question is presented to Nick as a matter of who gets the vast estate when the guy dies, which is expected to be soon.

It’s really about the details of his research. Abigail is the result of a experimental genetics lab. (This bit reminds me just a little of Orphan Black). Abigail wants the details of the research that created her, because she wants to start it up again. Her stepmother won’t deal with her, so she enlists Nick as a go-between. Also as a patsy.

This one ends up being about who is using who.

I’m not totally sure about the science fictional nature of the reason why Abigail gets Nick into this mess. There was plenty of thriller there if Abigail was just a typical heir trying to stay alive to inherit, and if she and her stepmother were in the middle of some mutually assured destruction without the lab-related distraction.

You will end up feeling sorry for Nick. He should have seen it at least some of it coming.

~~~~~~ GIVEAWAY~~~~~~

I’m giving away a copy of Ruthless to one lucky U.S. or Canadian commenter.
a Rafflecopter giveaway

TLC
This post is part of a TLC book tour. Click on the logo for more reviews.
***FTC Disclaimer: Most books reviewed on this site have been provided free of charge by the publisher, author or publicist. Some books we have purchased with our own money or borrowed from a public library and will be noted as such. Any links to places to purchase books are provided as a convenience, and do not serve as an endorsement by this blog. All reviews are the true and honest opinion of the blogger reviewing the book. The method of acquiring the book does not have a bearing on the content of the review.

Review: Supreme Justice by Max Allan Collins + Giveaway

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | A Reviews> blog tours> book reviews> Giveaways
supreme justice by max allan collinsFormat read: ebook provided by NetGalley
Formats available: Paperback, ebook, audiobook
Genre: Thriller, Mystery
Length: 338 pages
Publisher: Thomas & Mercer
Date Released: July 1, 2014
Purchasing Info: Author’s Website, Publisher’s Website, Goodreads, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Book Depository

After taking a bullet for his commander-in-chief, Secret Service agent Joseph Reeder is a hero. But his outspoken criticism of the president he saved—who had stacked the Supreme Court with hard-right justices to overturn Roe v. Wade, amp up the Patriot Act, and shred the First Amendment—put Reeder at odds with the Service’s apolitical nature, making him an outcast.

FBI agent Patti Rogers finds herself paired with the unpopular former agent on a task force investigating the killing of Supreme Court Justice Henry Venter. Reeder—nicknamed “Peep” for his unparalleled skills at reading body language—makes a startling discovery while reviewing a security tape: the shooting was premeditated, not a botched robbery. Even more chilling, the controversial Venter may not be the only justice targeted for death…

Is a mastermind mounting an unprecedented judicial coup aimed at replacing ultra-conservative justices with a new liberal majority? To crack the conspiracy and save the lives of not just the justices but also Reeder’s own family, rising star Rogers and legendary investigator Reeder must push their skills—and themselves—to the limit.

My Review:

This was so much fun! I know there are terrible crimes committed, etc., etc., but the story was so tight and the point-of-view character had just the right touch of baddassery/snarkitude that I poured through it in one evening.

The story is a mix of early Tom Clancy (before they stopped editing him and the books got very bloated) and the Liam Neeson movie Taken. Supreme Justice has a relentless pace and a completely absorbing story. It is a bit of a formula political thriller, but in a good way.

The book is set in a near-future time period, and the suspense relies on Washington D.C. being very much a company town, with said company being the U.S. Federal government. (Shades of Clancy). The near-future is easy to determine, because the current president is the second African-American president, after the first one with the middle name “Hussein”. No guesswork required.

But the setup is that in between these two liberal Democratic periods, the U.S. got through 8 years of an absolute neocon who packed the Supreme Court and pushed through legislation that beefed up the Patriot Act, gave all police officers even wider authority for search and seizure, pretty much wiping out the 4th amendment, reinstated prayer in public schools and repealed Roe v. Wade.

For liberals, it was a seriously sucky eight years. Former Secret Service Agent John Reeder feels more than a bit responsible for four of those eight years. He took a bullet for the neocon president, even though he hated every policy the man stood for. Reeder did his job, and made the president a hero in the process. Reeder retired because he couldn’t stand the politics any longer.

Which doesn’t mean he wasn’t good at his job. He is. He’s so good that he was able to parlay his government experience into creating a very successful security consulting firm.

When a Supreme Court justice is killed in the middle of a botched robbery, Reeder’s old friend at the FBI calls him in as a consultant. And the first thing he notices is that the whole mess was not a botched robbery. It was an assassination concealed by a botched robbery.

Even before a second justice is murdered, Reeder is the first one to figure out that someone is knocking off conservative justices, with an eye to letting the current president fix the balance of the Court. But when Reeder starts to close in on a possible lead, someone close to the investigation decides that the best way to derail it is to kidnap Reeder’s daughter.

If the motto is to “keep your friends close and your enemies close”, then who is so close that they know Reeder is the investigator with an inside track to the killer?

Escape Rating A-: Some of the early Clancy books had this same sense of tightly packed political thriller with hidden conspiracy theory agendas. And Liam Neeson’s Taken is the story of an ex-CIA Agent on the hunt to find his kidnapped daughter.

But just because a story has been done before (everything has been done before, after all) doesn’t mean that it can’t be very entertaining when it’s done well. Supreme Justice is done extremely well.

It hinges on Reeder being an intelligent and likeable character, which he is. He’s pretty honest about how he feels about people and situations, even when that honesty gets him in trouble. His amazing ability to read people makes him an expert investigator. He doesn’t just look at the evidence, he studies the people who are making the evidence.

Even when he doubts himself, he is constantly trying to figure out everyone else, and usually succeeding. His big failure is what makes this case work.

As much as I might personally dislike (or even hate) the conservative turn that the country has taken between now and the setting of the story, the way that it happens makes perfect sense. And so in the end does the motivation for the crime spree.

If you enjoy tightly plotted political action thrillers, and I do, Supreme Justice is absorbing fun to read.

TLC
This post is part of a TLC book tour. Click on the logo for more reviews.

~~~~~~GIVEAWAY~~~~~~

The author is giving away a copy of Supreme Justice to one lucky US/CAN winner!
a Rafflecopter giveaway

***FTC Disclaimer: Most books reviewed on this site have been provided free of charge by the publisher, author or publicist. Some books we have purchased with our own money or borrowed from a public library and will be noted as such. Any links to places to purchase books are provided as a convenience, and do not serve as an endorsement by this blog. All reviews are the true and honest opinion of the blogger reviewing the book. The method of acquiring the book does not have a bearing on the content of the review.