Month: March 2024

Hussar Ballad

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★★★
“Russian off to war…”

This is an adaptation of a Russian play A Long Time Ago by Alexander Gladkov, but was inspired by the real-life exploits of Nadezhda Durova. She was a woman who basically pulled a Mulan, concealing her gender in order to defend her homeland in the Napoleonic and other wars of the early 19th century. Durova joined the army on her 23rd birthday and served honourably for a decade, even after her true gender was discovered. Tsar Alexander I was impressed when he heard about Durova, giving her a promotion after summoning the soldier to his palace in St. Petersburg. Wounded by a cannonball at the Battle of Borodino, she eventually retired in 1816, with the rank equivalent to captain-lieutenant.

Somehow this became a light and fluffy slice of musical rom-com. 17-year-old Shura Azarova (Golubkina) is an accomplished rider and tomboy, who meets Hussar officer Dmitry Rzhevsky (Yakovlev), and is mistaken by him as a brother in arms. [As usual in these things, significant suspension of disbelief is required!] When war with France breaks out, Rzhevsky returns to his unit and Shura convinces faithful family retainer Ivan (Kryuchkov) to help her join the army in disguise. She makes a name for herself as a skilled and brave courier, though her relationship with Dmitry is more adversarial than romantic. There’s a French actress on whom he has designs, triggering her jealousy. Mistaken as rivalry, Dmitry and Shura end up having a duel, though the war keeps interfering in its execution. 

All is forgiven after Shura is captured on a spying mission, Dmitry leading his platoon to the rescue, and leading to a rather decent extended fight, running through a ransacked stately home. [While the actual swordplay is no great shakes in general, the other stunts aren’t bad, including Shura leaping down off a balcony, which looks to have been done by the actress herself] The sudden moments where people burst into song are a little jarring initially, yet I got used to them – probably, again, a point of comparison to Mulan. The production is quite large in scale: there’s an opening ball sequence that’s impressive, and the battle scenes aren’t bad, albeit not quite War and Peace [though some of the costumes from it were recycled here!]

There is the obvious, and given the era probably entirely expected, patriotic theme, with discussions about defending the motherland. The film’s premiere took place on the 150th anniversary, to the day, of the previously-mentioned Battle of Borodino, a famous and bloody encounter between Russia and Napoleon’s forces – best known for inspiring the 1812 Overture by Tchaikovsky. However, it’s rarely heavy-handed, and for all its fluffiness, lack of substance and shortcomings in the motivation department, you do find yourself rooting for Shura. To be honest, perhaps to a greater degree than Dmitry, who comes off as a bit of an arrogant dick. Likely more genuinely progressive than anything coming out of Hollywood around the same time. 

Dir: Eldar Ryazanov
Star: Larisa Golubkina, Yuriy Yakovlev, Igor Ilyinsky, Nikolay Kryuchkov

Blondie Maxwell Never Loses

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★★★
“Miss-nority report”

This French film takes place a little way into the future, though society has undergone radical changes. Law enforcement is now privatized, with investigations contracted out to private investigators, who have to balance their costs in order to turn a profit on the cases they accept. One such PI is Blondie Maxwell (Langlart) – and to get the obvious out of the way first, no, she is not blonde It’s mentioned once, but never explained. She is currently on the trail of the terrorist Boloch, who has been mounting a campaign against Chronos Industry, the all-encompassing tech company, which is invested in almost every area of everyday life. The reward would go a long way to solving her perilous financial situation.

She gets a case to investigate the murder of an escort. It seems an open-and-shut case with the evidence squarely pointing at a journalist. However, something doesn’t sit right with Blondie, and the more she picks at the crime, the more it seems a set-up job. Even her getting the case seems suspicious, since authorities know she doesn’t have the resources to investigate it properly. The journalist claims the victim was actually his source, who was going to blow the lid of Chronos, not least a “dark” area of their network where murder for hire is bought and sold. Is he telling the truth, and what does this have to do with Boloch and his campaign?

As the tag-line above implies, this bears a significant resemblance to Stephen Spielberg’s Minority Report, with its tale of law and order run by technology. which someone on the inside gradually comes to realize isn’t as idyllic as it seems. This is rather less nuanced. At one point, a colleague of Blondie says, “Our job is to make the world safer. If that means sacrificing a little liberty, it works for me. It works for us all. It’s a choice we make as a society.” However, it’s clear Ivanowich’s sympathies are more aligned with Benjamin Franklin. This is very much a pre-liberty screed, though credit for being at least somewhat ahead of the curve with its concerns about artificial intelligence, an issue of increasing scrutiny in 2023.

Unlike Minority Report, it doesn’t have the budget to create a fully-fledged future society. This one looks like ours in almost every way, just with a few added bits of gadgetry, such as displays embedded into contact lenses. Maxwell’s main trait is her dogged determination to find out the truth, regardless of the personal cost, and she makes for an admirable heroine. As played by Langlart, she’s down to earth, though there were points where it seemed like the script had all but forgotten about Blondie. Either Ivanowich fell too much in love with the setting. or the story might have benefited from fewer characters and a sharper focus. Definitely not terrible though, and a good example of what can be done with imagination instead of budget.

Dir: Julien Ivanowich
Star: Léonie Langlart, Stéphane Dufourcq, Vincent Terrier, Boris de la Higuera

Cascade

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★★
“Falls off.”

It’s kinda interesting to compare this to Mercy Falls. Both concern an ill-fated trip into a scenic wilderness – all trees and waterfalls – by a group of friends, which goes increasingly off the rails. The main difference is, in Mercy, the call was coming from inside the house, as it were. Here, the threat is definitely external. The target is four friends, just finished high school and about to enter the world at large. Jesse (Oulette) will work as a mechanic; his girlfriend Alex (Waisglass) wants to leave their small town and go to college, but hasn’t plucked up the courage to tell Jesse yet. Making matters more complex, her father is part of the Dark Saints, a biker gang and generally criminal enterprise. 

This matters, because the Dark Saints just lost a shipment of drugs, the plane carrying it having crashed in a remote region of a nearby national park. Their minions are on the hunt for it, but – what are the odds? – Alex and her friends are first to stumble across it. A discussion ensues about what to do, but it’s all rendered moot after they cross paths with the minions. Before you can say, “implausible plot line,” Jesse has broken his leg and he, plus another of the quartet, pregnant pal Em (Laflamme-Snow) have been captured by the bad guys. It’s up to Alex to figure out what to do, as the only member of the group left able to operate freely.

Which is fortunate, since she’s also the smartest of the people wandering in the woods, and it’s not even close. Let’s just say, pond life would likely rate second or third place among these people, and I’m including both the hikers and the minions in those rankings. Seeing her mental wheels spinning as she out-thinks and outmanoeuvres her enemies is one of the few pleasures this offers. But it’s like watching a grand master playing chess against a pigeon. The only genuine and credible threat is her Dad and the Dark Saints, and they don’t show up until the very end of proceedings. With Alex’s witless friends, dumb and/or unlikable, the ones in peril, the stakes here aren’t enough to engage the viewer either. 

I will say, the film does look half-decent, with Diego Guijarro’s cinematography popping nicely off the screen, and the Canadian backdrop is scenic. But too often, the film pulls its punches, whether it’s a character leaping off the waterfalls, depicted with them simply vanishing out of sight, or a pivotal car crash in which it appears no vehicles were actually harmed. This might as well be a TVM, with only the potty-mouths of some inhabitants meriting more than a PG rating. It’s all blandly innocuous, and despite Waisglass’s best efforts, it never gels. Things like Em’s pregnancy, for instance, feel like an afterthought, which goes nowhere and seems like nothing more than a cheap ploy to get audience sympathy. Memo to the film-makers: it didn’t work. 

Dir: Egidio Coccimiglio
Star: Sara Waisglass, Joel Oulette, Sadie Laflamme-Snow

The Harlequin Protocol, by Liane Zane

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Literary rating: ★★★★★
Kick-butt quotient: ☆☆☆☆

This is the second novel in the author’s Unsanctioned Guardians trilogy, a prequel to her earlier Elioud Legacy series. The new trilogy presents the background of how the three heroines of the first one (all of whom were intelligence agents, though of different nationalities) met and formed their sub rosa partnership as off-the-books rescuers of female victims of sexual abuse and trafficking. In the first book, The Covert Guardian, Zane focused entirely on Olivia Markham, who would become the trio’s ringleader, describing her recruitment and first mission with the CIA. Olivia continues to be the main (and almost sole) viewpoint character here, but this installment also introduces the other members of the threesome, Capt. Alzbeta “Beta” Czerna of Czech military intelligence and Anastasia “Stasia” Fiore of Italy’s CIA equivalent, AISE.

My impression is that about two years have passed in Olivia’s career since the previous book (the date for this one, 2011, isn’t mentioned in the text itself as I recall, though it is in the cover copy; but I don’t remember any exact date for the first one.) Here as in all of Zane’s work, her knowledge of spy-craft, of the various brands, specs and capabilities of firearms and explosives used by U.S. and European military and intelligence services, and of the cultural and physical geography of a variety of European settings is a strength of the series, and never delivered intrusively. (Action here moves from Berlin to Brussels, to Prague and the Czech-Polish border region, and to Venice.)

We also get an inside look at the bureaucratic mindset of the present-day CIA (which has been negatively commented on in nonfiction writings by intelligence professionals who know about the subject), the penchant of some of its honchos for turf and ego protection, and the tendencies towards abuse of power that can be endemic in secret organizations. (The latter is a point of contact with John LeCarre’s work, though I suggested in my review of the previous book that Zane’s vision is more like that of Manning Coles or Alistair MacLean –like the latter, she does view espionage in moral terms, as properly concerned with thwarting genuine evil, but she’s also realistic about the moral shortcomings and conflicting agendas that intelligence agencies staffed by fallible humans can be prey to.)

Because the author and I are Goodreads friends, she graciously gifted me with a review copy of the paperback edition of this book, as she has with all of her books, as soon as it was published; though she knew I’d really liked the previous book, she didn’t pressure me for a favorable review, but trusted that the book would stand on its merits. It definitely did; I actually liked this one even better! What earned the added appreciation (and the fifth star) was what I felt was the heightened dimension of moral challenge and choice here, which for me often makes the difference between great and merely good fiction, and which isn’t as strongly present in the first book. Discerning what the right thing is here requires thinking for oneself, not just obeying orders; and deciding to do it comes with a real risk, not just of harm to life and limb, but of disapproval from the powerful, of serious repercussions to one’s career, and maybe of legal punishment. The strong, distinct characterizations of the three heroines, who are each very different individuals though sharing a basic gut instinct for justice and decency, is also a positive feature that makes the book stand out from the pack.

Bad language here is minor. There’s no explicit sex; Olivia stumbles on a gang rape at one point, but it’s not graphically described, and though we see the traumatized and abused victims of sex trafficking (and in one case the dead body of a victim), we aren’t forced to see what they went through. As far as Olivia’s personal life is concerned, it’s briefly mentioned that since the first book, she’s been intimate with only one man, whom she loved and expected to marry (readers of the preceding trilogy will know that didn’t happen!), but the couple’s privacy isn’t violated.

We do have a lot of violence here, and a high body count, but Zane doesn’t make it any more gory than it has to be. IMO, this trilogy should be read in order. However, I wouldn’t say that the previous trilogy necessarily needs to be read first; and it’s really in a different genre(s) than this one, so might not actually appeal to all of the same readers (though I greatly like both). This is neither obviously supernatural fiction (though readers who’ve read the Elioud Legacy will pick up on something that others won’t) nor romance. But it should appeal to all fans of action adventure and espionage fiction, especially those who appreciate heroines in action roles (here, we’ve got not just one but three ladies who can and do kick some serious evil-doer butt!).

Author: Liane Zane
Publisher: Zephon; available through Amazon, both for Kindle and as a print book.
A version of this review previously appeared on Goodreads.

Killing Ruth: The Snuff Dialogues

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★★
“Editing. It’s a choice.”

As soon as I saw the running time of this was one hundred and thirty-one minutes, it immediately went onto the back-burner. I have a busy life, and I’ve going to devote close to two and a quarter hours to a low-budget movie, it is going to be when I have a lot of time to spare. My qualms were obvious, and proved very well-founded. This absolutely had no need to be so long. Indeed, it feels like a first draft, which became a shooting script, and everything filmed then ended up in the end product. Entire scenes are superfluous, and those which aren’t could use between “some” and “an oce-lot” of tightening up.

It’s the story of Ruth Keeley (Huljak), who comes home one day to find her father shot dead in his car. She eventually discovers that he had been a hit-man, working for Rod Porter (Jackson), and ends up following into the family business, as it were. On one job in a hospital, she ends up befriending Mrs. Connors (Wallace), the patient in the next bed to her target, and starts sharing her life with the old woman, who offers zero moral judgement. That includes her relationship with long-suffering boyfriend Cameron (Sanzari), and the quest to find out who was behind the death of her father, and why. Which turns out to be exactly who I expected, from about two hours previously.

The idea at its core is not a bad one. There’s something to be said for the idea of an assassin being plain and unremarkable, allowing them to slide past without attracting attention. Ruth is certainly that, being a waitress until her change in career direction, and Huljak is a good choice. She’s incredibly normal, and about as far from the Luc Besson-style of supermodel hit-woman as you can imagine. I’d like to see a film where we have a hitwoman dealing with everyday issues in between violent killing sprees, such as figuring our taxes, or dealing with annoying neighbours. This, however, is more interested in low-key conversations – and by “low-key”, I mean too many scenes which, to borrow a Python quote, wouldn’t “voom” if you put four million volts through them.

Even Wallace, who brings value to everything she’s in, isn’t able to energize things adequately. Not helping: the film brings in ideas, then discards them again, almost at random. For example, Ruth’s late father shows up and talks to her for a bit, then just… doesn’t. Or she gets a mysterious letter from her father’s killer; an angle which the movie forgets about entirely for a good hour, before bringing it back in, semi-randomly, at the end, to try and achieve closure. Long before that point, this had been reduced to the level of background radiation. It was on, and I was in the same room as it. Much more than that, I can’t commit to. But it definitely fails as action, probably as a thriller, and largely as drama too.

Dir: Nicholas Kinsey
Star: Irena Huljak, Dee Wallace, Kevin Jackson, Patrizio Sanzari

C.A.T.S. Eyes

  By

★★★
“The not-so Gentle Touch”

This was a sequel to hit series, The Gentle Touch, which had finished its run after five series in November 1984. Police detective Maggie Forbes (Gascoine) has quit the force, but had been recruited by Nigel Beaumont (Warrington) to join a somewhat unofficial Home Office group called Covert Activities Thames Section a.k.a. CATS, along with two other women. Their cover is the “Eyes” detective agency – hence the show’s title. They investigate various crimes and cases, mostly but not exclusively those which pose a threat to British national security. It ran for three series, covering thirty episodes, from April 1985 through June 1987, and was apparently fairly successful in the ratings. 

The obvious inspiration is Charlie’s Angels, in that you have a female trio, of different styles, solving crimes under the loose supervision of a man. However, the differences may be more significant than the similarities. While they do have different personalities, the clearest distinguishing trait in the British show is class, rather than hair colour. There’s working class Fred Smith – short for Frederica (Ash) – middle class Maggie, and upper class Pru Standfast (Rosalyn Landor), replaced after the first season by equally posh Tessa Robinson (Ward). It’s more grounded as well. Although the trio here do sometimes go undercover, it’s not an excuse for cheesecake, with them taking on the roles of women in prison, roller derby girls, etc. The CATS ladies are more likely to be barmaids or hotel workers in the line of duty.

You can also play “Spot the British actor”, with a near-constant stream of guest stars who you might recognize from other places, past or future. As well as Warrington, who’d go on to be the Caribbean commissioner in much-loved Brit-show, Death in Paradise, they include Ray Winstone, Lionel Jeffries, Charles Gray, Marina Sirtis, Peter Capaldi, Anthony Head, James Cosmo, Alan Ford, Ronald Lacey, Penelope Wilton and Alfred Molina. The last-named actually ended up marrying Gascoine in 1986, after his appearance. So that’s nice. The episodes are a bit more of a mixed bag. Some do a good job of capturing the murky world of intelligence, where expedience determines outcomes as much as justice. Other seem frankly implausible. 

Unlike The Gentle Touch, where the work/family balance was a key part of proceedings, we get very little about the trio’s life outside their work. That may be for the best, since Gasgoine is the most effective actress of the three, and things elevate whenever she gets the chance to do her dramatic thing. Action wise, it’s… reasonable. The sponsorship of the Ford Motor Company is kinda obvious, in that almost every episode contains several unnecessary scenes of them driving to or from places, but it’s certainly more credible and genuinely liberated than Charlie’s Angels. While certainly a time-capsule of the eighties (not least the hair!), it has generally stood the test of time reasonably well, and indeed, some aspects may have more resonance now. We watched the show on Sunday mornings, and that may be the best way to approach them.

Creator: Terence Feely
Star: Jill Gascoine, Leslie Ash, Tracy Louise Ward, Don Warrington

Undefeatable

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★★★
“Keep an eye out for you, Stingray.”

The traditional rule of thumb is, Cynthia Rothrock’s Hong Kong movies are good, but her American ones are bad. The question is, what category should this one be placed? On the one hand, it’s a Hong Kong production. On the other, it’s filmed in America, with an American cast. On the third hand, it’s directed by notorious schlockmeister Ho, as “Godfrey Hall”. I’m painfully aware how much his work can vary in quality, though I’ll confess, I am generally adequately amused. The results here are a real grab-bad of the good, the bad and the laughable. Put it this way: Cynthia is probably close to the best actor. That’s not something you’ll hear often.

She plays former gang member Kristi Jones, now trying to go straight. But in order to put her sister through medical school, Kristi raises money by taking part in street fights, arranged through her former colleagues in the Red Dragons. Meanwhile, Paul (Niam), a.k.a. “Stingray”, another fighter on the underground circuit, goes mad after his wife leaves him. He begins kidnapping, torturing and killing any woman who resembled his departed spouse. Unfortunately, his victims include Kristi’s sister, and she’s not happy about it. With the help of police detective Nick DiMarco (Miller) and psychiatrist Dr. Jennifer Simmons (Jason), Kristi makes her way through various opponents who might be involved, before focusing on Paul, and the warehouse from which he operates.

This is all, quite obviously, total nonsense. It’s the kind of film where everyone is adept at martial arts – even Dr. Simmons throws a few punches when she gets a visit from Stingray. It’s also the kind of film where a police officer will let the sister of a murder victim tag along on his investigation, because reasons. One wonders how much direction Ho was actually giving the cast. In particular, Niam, whose entire performance seems to revolve around making veins pop in his forehead. There is one (1) decent scene, where Dr. Simmons tries to figure out Stingray’s traumas and issues (his Mommy was bad to him or someting), in order to use them against him and escape. It’s the only moment this rises above the utterly basic.

On the other hand, we’re not here for the psychology. We’re here for the ass-kicking, and the film has no shortage of this, with Ms. Rothrock in decent form, both with her fists and some weapons. There’s a nice – if entirely pointless – scene of her doing forms on the lawn outside her house. But it’s mostly reasonably well-staged hand-to-hand fights, and there’s no question Rothrock acquits herself well. The end fight is slightly disappointing, in that Kristi has been hurt in a previous encounter with Stingray, so has one arm in a sling, and needs help from DiMarco. However, there are not one but two groanworthy eighties action one-liners there: the one in the tag-line above is perhaps only second worst. I couldn’t call this good, yet was I not entertained? Yes. Yes, I was.

Dir: Godfrey Ho
Star: Cynthia Rothrock, John Miller, Don Niam, Donna Jason

Ebony Hustle

  By

★½
“Credit where credit is due…”

When the best part of a movie is the opening credits, we have a problem. That’s the case here, with an 007-influenced montage that feels as if it cost more than the entire rest of the film to put together. However, by that point, the movie was already on thin ice, because the volume of the music was roughly three times that of dialogue in the pre-credit scene. Lunging repeatedly for the button on the remote is always a red flag for any indie movie, and proved accurate here. The same goes for the gratuitous name-checking of much better black heroines, such as Christie Love and Cleopatra Jones. They just draw attention to the deficiencies here – not that they are hard to see.

The unusually named heroine (Lamb) is a former stripper turned insurance fraud investigator, and unwillingly accepts a case to look into the disappearance of 16-year-old girl, Ny’Kia (Elizabeth). She had become part of the retinue of former gangster turned pastor, Caleb Truth (Chandler, who looks like you ordered Snoop Dogg on wish.com). He is supposedly a reformed character, and speaks all his lines in rhyme. This is an affectation which grows steadily more annoying, every time he speaks. It seems it may even have irritated the makers, because that thread – which I’d have thought would have been the main plot – is ended, alongside Truth’s doggerel rapping, with relatively little trouble by Ebony, when there’s still half an hour to go.

The remaining time is largely filled by Ebony’s romantic entanglements. She’s a highly predatory cougar, which seems something of a double standard, considering the way she goes after Caleb Truth, for activities that aren’t really that different. There are also far too many unconvincing FaceTime conversations, though at least these are largely free of the audio issues which infect many of the face-to-face scenes. There is one which does work, between Ebony and former husband, police detective Wayne (Stevenson), both expressing regret over their shared past. Both actors are convincing, and it offers a rare moment of emotion which feels genuine here. It helps it’s understated and quiet, standing in sharp contrast to the shrill yelling and show-boating which permeates just about every other moment.

I can see where the makers were trying to go. It’s just that they managed to ignore all the elements which made black heroines of the seventies so memorable. Here’s a clue, it wasn’t flirty chat-chat with younger men over the telephone. Not to say the likes of Foxy Brown weren’t sexual creatures: it just never felt it was their main raison d’etre. Here, it feels like… well, Ebony may have left the strip-club, but the strip-club never left Ebony. Her crime-fighting trails in, a long way behind and seeming little more then an afterthought. Any time this feels like it might be achieving its ends, something happens – such as Ebony’s boss appearing, an early contender for worst actor of the year – and it all comes crashing back to earth.

Dir: Jamezz Hampton
Star: Michelle l Lamb, Andrew Chandler, Ryan Elizabeth, Joel Stevenson

Damsel

  By

★★★
“Dis dress in distress.”

Brown is definitely among Netflix’s golden girls. After breaking out with an ensemble role in Stranger Things, she has taken an action turn, starring in Enola Holmes plus its sequel, and now is in this unconventional fable. If I was feeling snarky, I’d say I liked this better the first time I saw it, when it was called The Princess. That’s a little harsh, though I did feel it was superior. For example, this feels like it takes longer to get going, with Princess Elodie (Brown), daughter of a poor kingdom, married off by her father, Lord Bayford (Winstone), to Prince Henry, the scion of the rich land of Aurea, in a fairy-tale wedding. 

If you’ve seen the trailer you’ll know this isn’t as nice as it seems. Turns out Elodie is (eventually) intended as the latest in a long line of human sacrifices, for the dragon living in a nearby mountain, to keep it from torching Aurea. But she has no interest in going down in flames, and will do whatever it takes to survive and escape. This mostly involves ripping off bits from her wedding dress, to the point I wondered if it’d end with a nude Elodie, storming the Aurea castle, with a dagger in her teeth [Pauses to check we’re on legal turf with that mental image… Yep, please proceed] But she also discovers things are more complex than they seem, with the dragon having her own motivation. 

Bits of this work very well. The fire effects are often spectacular, and whoever cast Aghdashloo as the dragon deserves a raise. Her voice, which sounds like she has gargled battery acid for a decade, is just perfect. Fresnadillo has a decent visual style as well, although the CGI world is sometimes a little too obvious. However, the narrative doesn’t stand up to scrutiny. We have to believe the whole human sacrifice thing, or even the dragon, are a secret unknown to anyone outside the kingdom. Then there’s the way – spoiler alert – Elodie and the dragon end up on the same side, even after it kills her father. And a key plot point sees the dragon hurt by its own fire. Y’know, the stuff it has been repeatedly gargling?

The message here is fairly misanthropic too, none of the male characters being worth a shredded wedding dress. [Its release on International Women’s Day was particularly cringe] Should be no surprise that it ends in her basically going full Daenerys Targaryen, though much as in Enola, Brown’s character feels rather anachronistic. I’d like to have more of the supporting cast, in particular Queen Isabelle of Aurea (Robin Wright, evoking memories of her role in The Princess Bride), and Elodie’s stepmother, Lady Bayford (Angela Bassett). The former in particular is fun to watch. I’d rather have seen her play the heroine: “Hello, my name is Princess Buttercup. You tried to feed me to a dragon. Prepare to die.” Oh, well: guess this will have to do.

Dir: Juan Carlos Fresnadillo
Star: Millie Bobby Brown, Shohreh Aghdashloo, Ray Winstone, Brooke Carter

Fighting Karma, by Reid Bracken

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Literary rating: ★★★½
Kick-butt quotient: ☆☆½

This is a sequel to Saving Karma, also by Reid Bracken, and follows on from the events there. When we last saw heroine Bree Thomas, she had taken down, in spectacular fashion, the city belonging to Chinese business mogul Aslam Meng, which was a front for large-scale organ harvesting. At the end, she and her father, Cole, both discover that the other is not dead as was previously thought. Though there’s still quite a lot of road to cover before Cole and Bree will be re-united. That journey is the main topic of this second installment, together with continuing to fight against Meng’s sinister plans.

For – surprise! – the billionaire is not as dead as he seemed at the end of part one. He’s just moved on, though is still obsessed with the idea of extending his life past its natural span. That’s a process in which Bree will be playing a very important role. He is also engaged in a plan to mine rare-earth minerals from the ocean floor in the Andaman Sea, regardless of the ecological price. Hey, if it causes an earthquake, tsunami and swamps Burma, that’s just a bonus opportunity for expansion, right? But there’s dissent in the ranks, with his niece Jade looking to supplant her uncle as the head of the Meng Foundation. 

On its own, this would likely be considered a borderline entry for this site, because it’s as much Cole’s story as Bree’s, if not more so. It’s 35 pages or more before she so much as shows up, and then there’s a significant chunk where Bree is basically out of commission entirely. For good reason, to be sure, but it still diminishes the heroine action quotient. What perhaps pushes it over the necessary quota are the supporting characters. For beyond Bree, Jade makes for a strong and capable antagonist, and Cole also has a (sort of) sidekick, Tita, who ups the content in this department. Bree gets her work in, perhaps most memorably a spectacular escape on a Ducati from a cargo ship in to Macao.

There’s some good tech stuff in here too: if you’re familiar of the concept of “hard SF”, this could be described along the same lines as “hard action,” with a significant helping of gadgetry and cutting-edge undersea stuff which I liked. I must confess to slight eye-rolling when getting to the surprise at the end, because it reminded me of the Oscar Wilde quote: “To lose one parent may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose two, looks like carelessness.” I’m trusting the author will spin the wheel differently in the third volume which the revelation sets up. There is certainly enough scope that it shouldn’t be too taxing to do, and providing there’s a little more Bree on the menu, I’m looking forward to it.

Author: Reid Bracken
Publisher: Independently published, available through Amazon, both as a paperback and an e-book
Book 2 of 2 (so far) in the Bree Thomas Karma series. I received this copy in exchange for a honest review.