Tag: cop

Mardaani

  By

★★★½
“Korma’s a bitch… Uh, I mean KARMA…

Officer Shivani Shivaji Roy (Mukerji) is part of the Serious Crimes Squad in Delhi, whose approach to policing is very much “by any means necessary.” However, she is taken out of her area of expertise when Pyaari. a young girl she has been helping goes missing from an orphanage. Everything indicates the girl has been picked up by a sex trafficking ring, run by Sunny Katyal (Verma) and his partner, Karan (Bhasin), and will soon be sold off to the highest bidder and exported out of the country. Roy has to work her way up the chain to rescue Pyaari, despite opposition both from her boss, because it’s not her responsibility, and from the gang. As she gets nearer to the top, the climb becomes increasingly hard, with the criminals making it clear they won’t take lightly the threat to their lucrative business which Roy represents. It’s also clear they have friends in high places.

There’s a long-standing issue of extrajudicial action by the police in India, known locally as “encounter killings.” This film is far more likely to be the problem than the solution here, with the heroine behaving in a way of which Dirty Harry would certainly approve, yet severely at odds with contemporary Western policing methods. That’s apparent right from an early scene where she publicly assaults a culprit, punctuating a list of his offenses: “Section 143 – unlawful assembly. [Slap!] Section 147 – rioting. [Slap!] Section 132 – abetment of mutiny [Slap!]”, and so on. To see a male police officer do this in a modern movie would be shocking. To see a woman do it? It’s… kinda awesome, especially in India, a country where at the time the film came out, woman represented only 6.6% of the police force.

This comes to a climax at the end,. when she faces off against Karan, and he mocks her, saying his contacts will ensure he gets off lightly. She replies, “They can do it only if you reach the police station. But you won’t reach the police station, because this is India.” Then, when he asks, “Are you going to murder me in front of everyone?”, she responds, “In India, if 50 people take the law in their hands and kill someone, then it’s not called a murder. It’s called ‘Public outrage’.” As a rabble-rousing, cryptofascist call for vigilante justice due to corruption goes… This one certainly doesn’t hold back.

But it still works well, with Mukerji making Roy a well-rounded and sympathetic character. Her mission is driven as much by a semi-maternal rage as the usual macho bullshit, and she relies just as much on intelligence as brute force. Although the film loses steam when diverting attention to the bad guys, who are little more than cartoon caricatures, I especially enjoyed the phone-calls where Karan attempts to intimidate her, and fails completely. For Roy goes all Liam Neeson on him instead: “I don’t know what your name is. I don’t know where you are speaking from, who your boss is, or where you have kept Pyaari. But I’ve figured your type… I will hunt you down in 30 days.” Even the most liberal of viewers would be forgiven a fist-pump at the end when justice, legitimate or not, is served, piping-hot with a side of poppadoms.

Dir: Pradeep Sarkar,
Star: Rani Mukerji, Tahir Raj Bhasin, Jisshu Sengupta, Saanand Verma

Johnnie Mae Gibson: FBI

  By

★★
“Not-so fair cop”

This 1986 TV movie was the first film made about an FBI agent while they were still active. Gibson was the fifth black female agent in the bureau’s history: she broke new ground by being the first such assigned to the Fugitive Matters department in the Miami branch, and was also the first to reach a supervisory level within the FBI. That would, however, be well after the story told in this film. It covers how she came to join the FBI, and her first major undercover operation, taking down a gun-running ring operated by ex-NFL star, Adam Prentice (Lawson). However, Gibson starts to find the lines between real-life and undercover work blurring, and begins feeling genuine affection for her target. This doesn’t sit well with her partner, TC (Rollins). If it sounds all very by the numbers… It is.

No less stereotypical are the other black men in Gibson’s life. Most notable are her sternly disciplinarian father, who thrashes Johnnie after she accepts a Thanksgiving gift on a surplus turkey from some white folks, and Marvin (Young), the husband she meets at college. The latter is thoroughly unimpressed when she announces – in a staggeringly clunky fashion, showing up in full uniform – that’s she going to join the police force. You can imagine his reaction to her becoming an FBI agent, and his perpetual whining is perhaps the film’s most annoying aspect. Though it has to be said, when it comes to caring for their daughter, Gibson is very much the absent mother.

All the background stuff is bounced over so quickly as to be little more than a parade of cliches. Yeah, we get it: she had to overcome some obstacles. Though based on the evidence here, racism wasn’t really one of them, and the way sexism is depicted has some flaws, for example when a fellow trainee at Quantico kicks her ass repeatedly in hand-to-hand training. For this begs an obvious question: would a criminal in the field go easy on an FBI agent trying to arrest them, because they were a woman? Of course not. From that viewpoint, this incident was actually less sexism than a reality check. It could have been welcomed as such, showing Johnnie she needs to use her brain rather than brawn, rather than a simplistic message of The Man Keeping A Woman Down (literally).

The undercover case is not much better in this department, trotting out the usual tropes before suddenly exploding into a gun-battle at the end, which even Gibson, in interviews at the time it was shown, noted was entirely fictional. The TV movie seems particularly guilty of trying to cram too much in, and would have been better served by focusing either on its subject’s journey to becoming an agent, or on her work thereafter. By attempting to cover both, it succeeds in covering neither adequately. While the subject is undeniably worthy, I can’t say that this treatment feels as if it does her justice.

Dir: Bill Duke
Star: Lynn Whitfield, William Allen Young, Howard Rollins, Richard Lawson

Destroyer

  By

★★★
“Bad Madam Lieutenant.”

A fine, almost unrecognizable performance by Kidman succeeds in maintaining interest, despite a script which appears to regard time less like an arrow, and more like a big ball of wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey stuff. Deeply troubled cop Erin Bell (Kidman) wakes up in her car, apparently badly hungover, looking like ten pounds of crap in a five-pound bag. Not far away, her colleagues are poring over a newly-discovered murder scene: a body with a dye-stained hundred-dollar bill on the corpse. And that’s about the last time when I was quite certain of the timeline.

For everything thereafter unfolds in non-sequential order, going all the way back to Bell’s involvement in an undercover operation, two decades earlier. The target was a gang of armed robbers under the leadership of Silas (Kebbell). She and fellow officer Chris (Stan) successfully infiltrate the gang. But when the time comes for the planned heist, they come to a fateful decision, which misfires badly, and has haunted Erin ever since. At least that aspect is fairly clear, mostly due to the rather naff nineties hair-do Erin is wearing. [She’s a bit less credible playing an innocent twenty-something sheriff’s deputy] What’s less apparent – and kinda matters – is that some things apparently depicted as happening after the corpse is found, actually occur before it. Or maybe I was just being dumb?

To be honest, this is the kind of Tarantino-esque film-making which annoys the hell out of me. Because there’s no real purpose to the cut-up approach: it doesn’t add anything to our understanding of Bell’s character. Indeed, you could argue the lack of explanation – for instance, we don’t discover what happened on the heist until deep into the movie – dampens our sympathy for her, such as her struggles to connect with a rebelliously bratty teenage daughter (Pettyjohn). Similarly, we don’t know why she is so obsessed with Silas for much of the film. Also on the negative side is the near-criminal waste of Tatiana Maslany, as Silas’s druggie girlfriend Petra, and it’s perhaps a bit too obvious in its nods to Abel Ferrara/Harvey Keitel powerhouse, Bad Lieutenant, such as both cops’ fondness for baseball.

It’s director Kusama’s third entry on the site, after the well-regarded Girlfight and the not-so well-regarded Aeon Flux movie (though I never felt it deserved to be a box-office disaster) – as well as the entirely awful Jennifer’s Body. Still, you can’t argue she has not made interesting choices of projects, and this is never less than watchable, almost hypnotically so, due to Kidman’s performance. We witness Bell crumbling, yet also not giving a damn about police procedure or “civil rights” – witness her locking Petra in a car trunk! – in her relentless pursuit of Silas. It’s a toss-up, whether or not she’ll fall apart entirely before her mission is accomplished, and it’s this which sustained my interest. The other elements, not so much, yet I can’t consider the time completely wasted. Unlike Erin. :)

Dir: Karyn Kusama
Star: Nicole Kidman, Sebastian Stan, Toby Kebbell, Jade Pettyjohn

Deadly Exposé

  By

★★★
“Cheaters never win.”

After hacktivists expose the identities of users to a dating site, someone starts targeting the victims, murdering them in ways appropriate to their particular sexual fetish. Detective Maxine Peyton (Archer) leads the investigation, but it soon becomes clear that, as well as acting as a moral judge, jury and executioner, the killer has a particular interest in and connection to Maxine. Potential suspects include over-attached boyfriend and college teacher Simon (Hamilton), her cop partner Nick (Beemer),  ex-husband Ryan, or even slutty best friend, Jen (Ochise), who keeps trying to hit on Simon. Might even be e) None of the above. As the bodies continue to mount, Maxine has to find the perpetrator before he/she finds her.

I sense the likely destination for this was probably Lifetime or somewhere similar, yet in this case, that should not be taken as a bad thing. For especially in the early going, this is surprisingly well-written, with a good ear for dry sarcasm which helps flesh out characters that could easily be no more than stereotypes. I genuinely LOL’d at Maxine saying to an interview subject, “Please excuse my partner. He was raised by wolves.” This goes for just about everyone: even relatively minor roles, who have only a few moments of screen-time, appear to be real people. The inspiration is clearly the Ashley Madison data breach, though the company here is called “Adeline Lilly” instead – the hacktivist group responsible is also renamed, being “Incognito” rather than Anonymous. Might have been nice if the script had engaged a bit more with the moral issues here, rather than mentioning them in passing.

The problems, however, are more during the second half, as the story – and its climax in particular – relies heavily on the killer basically wanting to be caught. This is always an irritant, especially after the culprit has shown themselves to be relatively smart and savvy in the early going. It does feel like rather lazy writing, unless there has been some particular justification set up for it e.g. they have accomplished whatever it was they set out to do. In this case, that doesn’t happen, and instead someone close to Maxine is kidnapped in order to lure her in. Again, the motivation for this, and why he/she is so obsessed with her, is left rather too vague to work successfully.

Naturally, things end in a moral way, par for the TVM course: those who are guilty, in one way or another, tend to pay with their lives, while the (relatively) innocent are able to survive. While what follows is a spoiler, I have to say that does not include the killer, who is dispatched with surprising if satisfying brutality, at point-blank range. Despite my criticisms about the way things eventually unfold here, this was still a more than acceptable time-passer. Archer and the rest of the cast deliver engaging performances that were good enough to sustain interest, even when the story could have used some additional writing.

Dir: Chris James
Star: Melissa Archer, Graham Hamilton, Brandon Beemer, Alyshia Ochse

Pitbull: Tough Women

  By

★★★
“Still Poles apart.”

Having enjoyed the same director’s Women of Mafia, I thought I’d check out this earlier film, part of his Pitbull series, also about Polish cops ‘n’ criminals. Unashamedly populist, in its home country the featire set a record for opening weekend admissions by a local movie, and topped the overall box-office there for 2016. More surprisingly, it was also a hit when released in Britain, reaching fifth place at the box-office in its first week, due almost entirely to the Polish expat community there. ‘

It’s a similarly sprawling tale to Mafia – perhaps even more so – which covers a range of characters, on both sides of the law. Despite the title, disappointingly, the focus is not particularly on the women. While there are certainly no shortage of interesting female characters, as we’ll see, the central one is ‘Sugar’ (Fabijanski), a member of a biker gang who is tasked with a revenge hit on ‘Majami’ (Stramowski), a cop who shot and killed a fellow gang-member. However, Sugar ends up diverting into a convoluted scam involving smuggling fuel oil. I can only presume this scheme made sense to the Polish audience, because I had no real clue what was going on.

On the “tough woman” front, the focus is on two new recruits to the police force, Zuza (Kulig) and Jadźka (Dereszowska). It doesn’t take long after completing their training,. for the shine to come off, as they realize the harsh realities of law-enforcement work, and the inevitable moral compromise beneath the surface. These are exemplified in Izabela (Magdalena Cielecka), a cop who is more than prepared to bend the law in order to protect it, to put it mildly. Both rookie officers have their issues, in particular Zuza, who eventually ends up having an affair with Sugar, while his girlfriend ‘Drabina’ (Alicja Bachleda) is in jail.

Elements of all this work very well. The characters are strong, performances solid, I loved the purely pragmatic approach of the cops (needed to deal with criminals who hardly obey the niceties of polite convention either), and there are some fine moments of pitch-black humour. I was especially amused by the scene involving stepping in a half-dissolved corpse, and the subsequent discussion over protocol, whether or not the poor policewoman should keep her footwear, and forensic pathology:
   “There’s the liver.”
   “A liver’s that small?”
   “It’s normal, but half is on your shoes.”

The problem is largely Vega’s failure to tell a coherent story. I wondered if this might be down to my lack of local knowledge e.g. the fuel scam, perhaps enhanced by not having seen the previous entries in the Pitbull franchise. However, reading some local reviews [all hail, Google Translate!] suggests it’s not just me, with this being a common complaint. I can’t help wishing the writer/director had actually delivered on the potential of his premise: while certainly an equal-opportunity piece, this still falls short of what I wanted. Perhaps Vega knew he had half-assed it, and that’s why he circled back around so quickly for the not-dissimilar Women of Mafia.

Dir: Patryk Vega
Star: Sebastian Fabijanski, Joanna Kulig, Anna Dereszowska, Piotr Stramowski

BuyBust

  By

★★★
“Slum dogs and millionaires.”

The unapologetically brutal war on drugs being waged in the Philippines by hard-line President Rodrigo Duterte has come in for criticism abroad – and this film chips in to the argument from his home turf. Philippines DEA agent Nina Manigan (Curtis) is assigned to a new team, the sole survivor of her previous squad, killed after being betrayed to the drug gangs. Their new mission is to arrest leading boss Biggie Chen (Atayde), luring him out of the slum where he operates to a more vulnerable spot. However, at the last second, Chen changes the location of the meet, and despite misgivings, the squad enter the Gracia ni Maria area which is Chen’s home turf. To no great surprise, this turns out to be an ambush. Half the squad is wiped out in the initial assault, and with Chen jamming their calls for backup, Nina and the surviving members have to try and make their way out of a severely hostile environment.

The closest cousins are probably a couple of other foreign-language cop pics: Brazil’s Elite Squad and Indonesia’s The Raid. It has the moral ambivalence of the former, being set in a world where “by any means necessary” is the standard credo of law enforcement. This is combined with the relentless, action-driven approach of the latter, pitting a small group of cops in a confined space against a numerically superior and highly-motivated enemy. One problem is, those two movies are among my all-time favourites, both certainly ranking in the best action films of the 21st century. That’s a high bar for BuyBust to match, and it comes up short. What I took away was, there is a limit to how long you can go, before running gun-battles in murky alleys eventually become a bit tedious. And it’s considerably less than the 128-minute running time here.

It works better when adding more variety to proceedings, such as when the threat comes instead from the mercurial locals, whose loyalties cannot be relied on – they’re as fed up of the collateral damage caused by the police, as of the drug gangs themselves. And Curtis herself is surprisingly good, given her cinematic background hardly suggests hard-core action (she’s been a daytime TV host in the Philippines for almost a decade). She gets decent support from MMA giant Vera, who basically plays a tank, in a role surely destined for Dave Bautista in the inevitable Hollywood remake. Yet there’s clearly more to survival than mere size, just as there’s clearly more to making a good action film than copious quantities of ammunition.

In this case, editing half an hour of the less interesting stuff might well make for a significant improvement. These sections are more or less a group of faceless grunts exchanging fire with another group of faceless grunts, while scurrying through a poorly-lit slum. Less of this, and more of the start and end, where motivations become considerably clearer than what we see (or, rather, don’t see) in the middle, might have allowed this to live up to the level of its inspirations.

Dir: Erik Matti
Star: Anne Curtis, Brandon Vera, Arjo Atayde, Nonie Buencamino

Women of Mafia

  By

★★★½
“Poles apart.”

This is new territory for me, being the first Polish film to qualify here. Turns out, director Vega has, largely single-handedly, driven a bit of a new wave of cinema from that country. Rather than the lugubrious dramas of Krzysztof Kieślowski, Vega is more like Guy Ritchie, making violent gangster flicks. In this case, the script came with direct input from the gangsters themselves, one of whom contacted Vega after being annoyed by their portrayal in a previous movie. Probably wisely, he opted to take their criticisms on board here…

It’s very much an ensemble piece, covering the stories of five different women. Though perhaps the film’s biggest issue is they’re not quite different enough, and for some time, I was sure that two were the same person! It starts with police officer Bela (Bołądź), being recruited to go undercover and infiltrate the Mokotowska organized crime gang, whose boss Padrino (Bogusław Linda) rules Warsaw with an iron fist. She becomes the lover of one of his top henchmen, known as Cieniu (Fabijański). When he eventually is arrested, his wife Anya (Warnke) and their nanny, Daria (Dygant), take on the mantle, and start working for Padrino instead.

It was Bela and Daria I conflated, initially thinking that Cieniu [which is Polish for “shadow” – never say we’re not educational here!] had got Bela a job in his house, after falling for her. I was eventually disavowed of that, not least because Daria has a real talent for the criminal world, in particular the brutality necessary to survive. This becomes particular apparent after the film’s most harrowing scene, where she takes her revenge on another gang who tried to muscle in on her drug-running business. By the time she’s done, all that’s left of them is their teeth. To be honest, Vega might have been better concentrating on her character, as Daria’s transition from mild-mannered nanny to bad-ass is awesome.

The rest of the stories and character arcs are more of a mixed bag. Bela largely vanishes from the film in the middle, which concentrated on Ania and Daria – the former is a real trophy wife, dumb as they come, and interested only in being able to spend money. There’s also Padrino’s daughter, known as “Futro” (Julia Wieniawa-Narkiewicz), who is the apple of her daddy’s eye – made apparent in a great scene where he praises her singing talent… and we then hear what she sounds like. That affection can be used against him, and when Futro’s drug use becomes a problem, Bela poses as a therapist to get into her father’s house that way. The fifth woman… I literally have no recollection of: Siekiera, played by Aleksandra Poplawska. Sorry. 

Even at 138 minutes long, the film is perhaps spread too thin: a mini series might have given the material more room to breathe. However, this is still an impressive, entertaining watch, and the time flies by. It’s slickly produced, and populated by figures who bear the shape of real-life – albeit perhaps in an exaggerated form. Vega has stated his intention is to make a trilogy, and the end certainly points that way. I’m looking forward to the next installment.

Dir:Patryk Vega
Star: Olga Bołądź, Sebastian Fabijański, Katarzyna Warnke, Agnieszka Dygant
a.k.a. Kobiety Mafii

Perdida

  By

★★½
“Lost cause.”

The film begins with an Argentinian school-trip to a volcanic area, which goes badly wrong when one of the schoolgirls, Cornelia, vanishes. Despite an extensive search, all that’s found is her locket. 14 years later, the missing girl’s best friend, Pipa (Lopilato), is now a cop, channeling the guilt she still feels about Cornelia’s disappearance and her role in it, into work. After a mass to mark the anniversary of the incident, Cornelia’s mother visits Pipa, begging her to re-open the case. Despite initial qualms, she does so, only to find a restaurant-sized can of worms comes along with it. Pipa finds herself facing a serious criminal organization, under the control of a woman known as The Mermaid (Salamanca), whose tentacles stretch both around the world and into the past.

This is based on the book Cornelia, by Florencia Etcheves. Whether the same is true of the source novel, I can’t say, but the film is very clearly influenced by The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, and other entries in the Nordic noir genre, right down to the snowy, desolate Patagonian landscapes where the film both opens and closes. Pipa is the typical heroine of such things, far more skilled at dealing with evidence than people, although here subcontracts out any shady technological needs to her Lisbeth Salander-alike pal, Alina (Sabatini). I spotted the main twist early on too, though in the film’s defense, I’m not sure how much it was supposed to be a surprise, since it seemed blindingly obvious in its nature.

A bigger problem is likely what goes around it, with elements that seem to show up out of nowhere: maybe they’re explained better in the book? For instance, Pipa gets a key clue from an inmate at a lunatic asylum, yet I’m not sure how she discovered this. And if the heroine is apparently so guilt-ridden over Cornelia’s disappearance, and was propelled by it to make a career in law-enforcement, why did she not bother to re-open the case for almost a decade and a half? Lopato gives an okay performance, managing to make her spiky, loner character somewhat likeable – another key aspect of Nordic noir. However, I was more intrigued by The Mermaid, and her character arc. How does someone become so indifferent to the suffering of others? There’s scope for a Maleficent like retelling of this story, from her point of view.

This is more of a general observation than a specific criticsm, yet I get the feeling this kind of thing might work better as a TV series. The additional time available would allow an extended period over which viewers can get to know the participants and their quirks. The finale here certainly feels rushed, to the point that you barely have time to go “Hang on, that doesn’t make sen…” before it’s over. A fractured timeline doesn’t help in terms of the necessary building of relationships with these characters, and the final result comes up significantly short of the necessary amount of emotional impact.

Dir: Alejandro Montiel
Star: Luisana Lopilato, Amaia Salamanca, Rafael Spregelburd, Oriana Sabatini

The Heat

  By

★★★
“Warm, rather than hot.”

McCarthy appears to be Feig’s muse, having starred in his last four movies, from Bridesmaids through this, and then on to Spy and the Ghostbusters reboot. The results here, also fall somewhere in the middle: while decently amusing, this mis-matched cop comedy falls short of the unexpected glory which was Spy. Straight-laced FBI agent Sarah Ashburn (Bullock) is great at her job, but disliked by her peers for her officious attitude. In order to try and win a promotion, she accepts a case in Boston to locate an elusive and unknown drug lord, Simon Larkin. There, she immediately encounters and antagonizes a local cop, Shannon Mullins (McCarthy); Mullins is also a good law-enforcement agent, but the polar opposite of Ashburn, being loud- and foul-mouthed, and no respecter of authority. Inevitably, the two have to work together, and eventually develop respect and affection for each other, etc. as they solve the case. You know the drill.

The story here is incredibly hackneyed, and making the protagonists a pair of women is about the laziest twist imaginable by writer Katie Dippold. Mind you, she co-wrote the Ghostbusters reboot as well, so part of me wonders if her elevator pitches all consist of “(insert film name), but with women!” [Though for the record, she was not involved with the upcoming Ocean’s Eight] What salvages the film are the lead actresses, with both Bullock and McCarthy in equally fine form. The latter has that hyper-acidic persona down to a T, from the moment we first see Mullins, and she tells her boss, “I’ll be there sharply at go-fuck-yourself o’clock, if there’s no traffic.” Ashburn is at the other extreme, prissily tightly-wound, yet so inept personally, she has to kidnap a neighbour’s cat for affection since hers ran off. They’re a perfect match: Mullins doesn’t give a damn, because Ashburn gives them all.

It is at these two extremes when the movie is at its most entertaining, and that’s in the early going. As the film progresses, both of the characters drift towards the middle from the edges. They generally become less interesting as a result, though there’s still amusement to be had from Ashburn’s spectacularly incompetent attempts to be a bit sweary. There’s also a gloriously gory sequence, as she attempts to carry out a tracheotomy, having seen one on television. However, not all of the comedy works, and there’s absolutely no reason why this needs a running time of more than two hours. For example, the scene where they fight each other to go through a door first, goes on about three times as long as is either necessary or funny, and the scenes involving Mullins’s dysfunctional family left me entirely cold. They’d have been better off abandoning all efforts at the drug lord plot, and just given us 90 minutes of the central pair, at the Odd Couple counterpoints of their characters, and the resulting, delightful bickering.

Dir: Paul Feig
Star: Sandra Bullock, Melissa McCarthy, Demián Bichir, Marlon Wayans

Burned, by A. Blythe

  By

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

My name is Alyse Winters. I used to be a powerful djinni until…
   “We’ve got a burn notice on you – you’re blacklisted.”
When you’re burned, you’ve got nothing. No cash, no credit, no job history. You’re stuck in whatever city they decide to dump you in.
   “Where am I?”
   “Philadelphia”.
You do whatever work comes your way. You rely on anyone who’s still talking to you. A sleazy ex-boyfriend. A friend who runs a sex-shop/illegal weapons depot. Bottom line? Until you figure out who burned you… You’re not going anywhere.

Yeah, it’s kinda like that: a paranormal version of long-running series, Burn Notice. Heroine Winters is an agent for the Shadow Elite, tasked with keeping order across the six different castes of djinni, a shape-shifter also capable of summoning virtually anything she needs with a snap of her fingers. She gets knocked out, and wakes to find herself in Phillie, sporting a fetching pair of copper bracelets that have robbed her of all supernatural skills, and entirely disavowed by her employers.

She needs to get herself back on her feet, figure out who was responsible and why, before some of the many people with good cause to bear a grudge against her, discover where the powerless ex-agent is now located. Doing so will require her to come to to terms with being locked in a single human form with very human limitations, as well as working for some questionable types who might be able to help Alyse. She also needs to figure out who is behind a series of brutal murders which are affecting even the most powerful members of her community – not least because the finger of suspicion there is pointing at her.

The “catch the real killer to prove you’re not guilty” reminded me of Fugitive of Magic, and even the cover looks a bit similar. Between that and the Burn Notice comparisons, this does feel over-familiar, even with the supernatural angles. But I did very much like the heroine, who is thrown back onto her wits, due to the lack of her paranormal talents, and refreshingly, simply doesn’t have time for the usual romantic dalliances. As she says, “When you’re a covert agent, stopping to process gets you killed. Feelings get you killed. I was trained to handle intense and dangerous situations without breaking a sweat… That’s how I survived every encounter so far, and that’s how I intended to survive my current predicament.”

On the other hand, this is a slightly thin storyline: can’t help suspecting, the original Michael Westen would likely have got everything here handled in 42 minutes, plus commercials. And the end collapses into sub-Bondian nonsense, the villain actually saying, “How about I show you our great achievement? I hate for you to die without knowing what your contribution will be. It wouldn’t be fair.” Really? It’s a poor and clichéd misstep, after which an otherwise half-decent book limps across the finish line.

Author: A. Blythe
Publisher: Red Palm Press LLC, available through Amazon, as both an e-book and paperback.
Book 1 of 3 in the Magic Bullet series.