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DEAD LOCK
by Sean Black
Bantam, July 2010
352 pages
12.99 GBP
ISBN: 0593063392


Buy in the UK | Buy in Canada

Ryan Lock, an ex-military police close protection specialist, is asked to take on a 'super high-end' job by a Federal Prosecutor in San Francisco. In Lock's line of work, a 'high-end' job is one that carries a high risk of getting you killed, so he assumes that the job he's being offered is going to be even riskier than that.

He's a bodyguard, not a complete idiot, so he turns it down, but before he has chance to leave, Jalicia Jones, a very determined lawyer who has done her homework on Lock, produces a piece of film that suddenly turns the job into one Lock can't walk away from quite so easily.

An undercover agent and his family have been tortured and killed, the murders caught on film by one of the group of white supremacists who Jones is trying to bring to justice. To be certain of securing a conviction on the difficult-to-prove grounds of conspiracy to murder, she is reliant in the testimony of one man. Frank Hays, known as the Reaper, is a leading member of the same gang, now serving multiple life sentences in Pelican Bay, one of America's toughest maximum security prisons. As the price of his cooperation, he's demanded a transfer from solitary confinement back into the general prison population. The Reaper clearly has his own agenda, but to get the convictions she wants, Jones needs to keep him alive long enough to testify, which is where Ryan Lock comes into the equation.

The only thing stopping Lock walking away from a job that even his friend and partner, hard man Tyrone Johnson, thinks is crazy, is the fact that Lock grew up with the murdered agent and was godfather to his son, also shot by the so-called Aryan Brotherhood. Against his better judgment, but determined to be revenged on his friend's killers, Lock agrees to go undercover into Pelican Bay prison and keep the Reaper alive for the next five days. Also motivated by friendship, Johnson goes along as well.

If the publicity claims are to be believed, the author went to some lengths to add authenticity to the book, even spending time in the 'supermax' prison that houses some of America's most violent prisoners, and the research certainly pays off. The prison scenes are tense and make a very good read, as do Lock's increasingly desperate attempts to keep the Reaper alive. The book is a simple, uncomplicated narrative, for once not told in the ubiquitous first person style. It gallops along from one action sequence to the next and is none the worse for it. The chapters are short and the narrative style is reasonably terse. The author certainly doesn't bog the reader down in detail, but the thing which I found the most refreshing change was the lack of a constant – and usually wearying – stream of artificial cliffhangers. The book didn't need them; its pace was fast enough not to require that sort of hook to catch the reader on.

If you like Matt Hilton's books, you'll certainly like this one.

§ Linda Wilson is a writer, and retired solicitor, with an interest in archaeology and cave art, who now divides her time between England and France.

Reviewed by Linda Wilson, August 2010

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Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)


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