About
Reviews
Search
Submit
Home

Mystery Books for Sale

[ Home ]
[ About | Reviews | Search | Submit ]


  

THE ASSASSINS
by Gayle Lynds
St. Martin's Press, June 2015
417 pages
$27.95
ISBN: 0312380909


Buy in the UK | Buy in Canada

Former spy and assassin Judd Ryder gets home a bit early and sees his physical double leaving Ryder's home, wearing his clothes. There is a hit-and-run "accident" and Ryder realizes he has to make himself scarce while he figures things out. He winds up being on the run for quite some time, as the situation proceeds to complicate itself geometrically rather than linearly. Ryder realizes that his (possible) romantic interest Eva Blake, now a CIA trainee, is probably also a target and he tries to warn her; this complicates her life, as she mistakes a (possible) kidnapper for someone from the Agency sent to take her somewhere else.

In the meantime, a man is killed when his Cobra explodes. Another Assassin gone. There were six of them, all superb at what they did. Only once did they all work on the same job, and it didn't go well. Now they are the targets. Who is the next target? Who is footing the bill? A limited number of options for the former question, an almost limitless number for the latter. Answering the second question will be difficult, and will give the remaining people involved the motive behind it all. There are people involved who are not targets, at least not directly. There is, especially when an operation is as large as this, collateral damage.

A few of the remaining Assassins, along with Judd and Eva, decide to work together and stay together. There are practical and tactical reasons for this and they are all aware that trust is probably not a thing to put a lot of hope in right now. The enemy of my enemy, etc. As well as the keeping one's friend's close and one's enemies closer. All the while, this group is researching enemies, tapping sources, pulling in markers. running from pillar to post, trying to stay alive, and kill their enemies. Multi-tasking at its finest.

I've heard people refer to a story/novel/movie/etc. as being "ripped from the headlines." This always makes me laugh, frequently out loud and in public. No published novel is written yesterday. It takes at least a year for a decent, reasonably well-written novel to make it from the writer's desk to the bookstore. I am, therefore, totally taken aback at Lynds' au courant story - it is so very likely in today's world, given what has been and is going on in the region encompassing Iran, Iraq, and Afghanistan. As with any espionage/thriller, the reader must have a certain willingness to suspend belief in the cruel, obstreperous, and arbitrarily inconvenient world and how it works. Lynd makes this fairly easy to do. Her characters are believable, and for the most part, relatively human, considering their line of work. As a good thriller writer, Lynds makes the reader doubt everyone, at least at first, and then perhaps again later. This has more twists, turns, and knots to unravel than a ball of yarn after a kitten has had it for fifteen minutes.

§ P.J. Coldren lives in northern lower Michigan where she reads and reviews widely across the mystery genre when she isn't working in her local hospital pharmacy.

Reviewed by P.J. Coldren, April 2015

[ Top ]


QUICK SEARCH:

 

Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)


[ About | Reviews | Search | Submit ]
[ Home ]