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GRIDLOCK
by Sean Black
Bantam, August 2011
352 pages
12.99 GBP
ISBN: 0593063414


Buy in the UK | Buy in Canada

Raven Lane works in the adult entertainment industry and to her it's a job like any other. It pays the mortgage and enables her to look after her younger brother, Kevin. But it's a job that comes with more risks than most, bringing with it the threat of stalkers and men who won't take no for an answer, men who think that they've paid for more than just to watch Raven strip and dance.

When Raven gets hassled by a guy in the car park when she's leaving a club her day takes a turn for the worse but that pales into insignificance besides the later discovery of a headless corpse in the boot of her car. Raven is already under the protection of the Los Angeles Police Department's Threat Management Unit as a result of her latest stalker, but the TMU don't have the resources for round the clock protection so on the recommendation of one of their officers, she turns to close personal protection specialist Ryan Lock for help. Lock agrees to get involved and as usual, his friend and partner, Tyrone Johnson, isn't far behind. As the pressure on Raven Lane mounts, Lock can't shake off the nagging feeling that she knows more about what is happening than she's letting on, and that feeling only strengthens when people connected with her start to meet a fate as grisly as the headless woman's.

Elite bodyguard Ryan Lock makes a convincing main character. He's down to earth and practical, rather than over the top and reeking of machismo like all too many action heroes. I liked him in the earlier books and he comes over well in GRIDLOCK as well, although I think the author has now probably stretched the device of incorporating Lock's surname in the title to the breaking point and beyond, a problem that tends to afflict any author who starts off the same way with titles, although Quintin Jardine got away with it longer than most in his Skinner series before he finally threw in the towel. The relevance of the title to the story is at best tangential and at worst, overly contrived.

One area in which Black shines is in the depiction of the interaction between both Lock and his friend with Raven's brother, Kevin and his girlfriend Wendy. The relationship between the two teenagers with Down's Syndrome is depicted touchingly but never patronizingly.

Black's thrillers have much in common and compare well with Matt Hilton's Joe Hunter series. There's plenty of action, but it never becomes an unremitting gore-fest, and the human angles are well played but, also in common with Hilton, I think Black falls down when it comes to giving his hero a love interest, as Lock's girlfriend appears to be little more than a convenient plot device. I'll happily forgive that, though, as Black manages to produce a reasonably written, well-paced thriller without resorting to the constant stream of artificial cliff-hangers that plague so many books of this type.

§ 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, November 2011

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Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)


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