Literary rating: ★½
Kick-butt quotient: ☆☆☆
This was a disappointment, and a real chore to get through. If it had been a film, I’d have been reduced to surfing Facebook distractedly on my phone for the majority of its running time. Unfortunately, you don’t get to leave a book on in the background. It’s a stylistic and literary mess, throwing at the reader Canadian Special Forces heroine Rayna Tan, without providing any real background or character building beyond an incident in the Middle East. It then randomly switches around between her, a brother/sister pair of Islamic terrorists, Ahmed and Fatima, and their startlingly incompetent American recruits, who appeared to have strayed in from Four Lions. Throw in some unsubtle politicizing – even if I don’t necessarily disagree with the ideas expressed, it’s not what I want to read in my fiction – and it feels more like a half-finished collection of ideas than a coherent novel.
For example, after quitting the military, Tan goes to work for a group called Fidelitas Capital. Their cover is that they’re a money management company with no qualms – except, when they discover evidence of wrongdoing, they also target the customers with their in-house super-secret group of former soldiers. It would be putting it mildly to say this raises more questions than it answers. Another problem, is that the “American Muslim Militia” whom Rayna and her pals are hunting are, as noted above, pretty crap as terrorists go, and likely pose a danger to themselves, more than any innocent bystanders in the USA. For comparison, the book briefly describes an attack by another group, who blow the top third off the Washington Monument using a fleet of twenty explosive-laden drones. Now, that’s what I call a terror attack. Why wasn’t the book about them?
I get that the author is trying to spin his narrative out of several threads, depicting both the terrorists and those who’re hunting them. Yet it’s all remarkably bitty, and lacking in any flow at all, such as when Rayna and her colleagues are suddenly the targets for some Japanese assassins. This seems to have strayed in from another book entirely, coming out of nowhere and going nowhere either. It all builds to a climax at Seattle’s Safeco Field, which sounded interesting because it’s a baseball park I visited last summer. As depicted here, I completely failed to recognize it. Lowe is no more adept at creating a sense of place, than he is at creating credible or interesting characters. I can also assure him that those who rent suites at a ballpark are not immune from all security searches, as is claimed.
According to the author, Rayna is “Smart—IQ off the charts. Lethal—more kills than Chris Kyle. Black belt martial artist. She’s sexy, vulnerable and complicated.” There are worthy aims. Shame there’s precious thin evidence of these traits to be found in this novel.
Author: Wesley Robert Lowe
Publisher: Amazon Digital Services, available from Amazon only as an e-book.
Book 1 of 2 (plus a prequel) in The Rayna Tan Action Thrillers series