Literary rating: ★★★★½
Kick-butt quotient: ☆
This fast-paced action novel opens the author’s Pia Sabel series, about an international women’s soccer star who takes over the management of her father’s world-class security firm. My read of it flew pretty quickly; the narrative drive and suspense kept me turning pages as fast as I could. It’s easy to imagine some readers finishing it in a few days –less time if they’re able to read it nonstop, and many might want to.
Brave, principled action heroines are an enormous draw for me in fiction, and Pia Sabel is an outstanding example of the type. Seeley’s skill in bringing her to life is the key to the novel’s success; she’s an intriguing, fully round character with a complex past that shapes her. (Not all of this past is revealed here, and what is revealed is exposed gradually, sometimes in a way that can create a bit of confusion; but stay with it.) Even as a young child, her life was impacted by violence. Her adoptive father is an enormously wealthy business tycoon with a drive and determination that he’s passed on to her. She’s rich in her own right from stocks he settled on her, gifted with a tall, strong physique developed as an athlete, and highly trained as a boxer.
Not a superwoman, she isn’t without her inner demons; she also lacks experience with security and combat, despite growing up around security operatives, and she can be dangerously brash and impulsive. But she has believable strengths that counterbalance these weaknesses. (One is native smarts, which she’s used to applying in competitive situations, and an ability to read people –though she doesn’t always realize when she needs to let these skills kick in.) Above all, she’s a caring, highly ethical person who genuinely wants to help others, whether it’s with her money or with her fighting ability.
Around her, the author has created an edge-of-the-seat plot which opens with a man’s head being blown off on the second page, and keeps up the pace until the end. Piracy and money laundering are the engines that drive the action (though Seeley doesn’t dwell on the intricacies of the latter), which includes life-and-death jeopardies for our heroine, along with plenty of gun fighting and hand-to-hand combat on land and water. The violence isn’t as bloody as it could be, however –while Pia packs bullets as a last resort, her Glock, like other Sabel Security firearms, is equipped to shoot quick-acting tranquilizer darts, and one of her first acts as head of the company is to require these to be the first resort in all cases. Pia’s also not the only strong female character in an action role here; Sabel Security’s Major Jonelle Jackson and Agent Tania are also well-drawn characters whom I expect to see more of in the later books.
I’d characterize the book primarily as action-adventure, but it has elements of the mystery genre too, with a criminal mastermind whose identity is hidden through much of the book, and will take some twists and turns to reveal. (I guessed one of Seeley’s secrets early on, but not all of them.) He develops the geographical settings –Geneva, Cameroon, Lyon, Vienna– with an assurance and vividness that suggests that he’s actually been to these places; and there’s none of the awkwardness here in handling language that’s so often associated with first-time, self-published novelists. He also knows soccer, and knows about guns, high-tech communication equipment, etc. IMO, most of the plot developments and motivations stand up well to examination.
What flaws did I find in the book? First, the descriptions of action scenes were often, for me, hard to follow visually; that is, from the language used, I couldn’t always exactly picture the action in my mind without it seeming awkward (that may be because I haven’t engaged in that sort of fighting, and don’t have the experience to picture it with), or because I couldn’t get the physical layout of the setting, as in the floor plan, etc. Second, Seeley sometimes suddenly drops bits of information that Pia or other characters have known before (but we haven’t) into the mix at moments when they can be useful, in a way that sometimes makes them come across as confusing, or as a Deus ex machina, or both. It would have made the narrative smoother, IMO, to introduce these earlier, and I don’t think it would have required info-dumps to do so.
There’s also a basic credibility problem; under the circumstances, I don’t think Alan Sabel would realistically have sold her the control of his security firm, and I don’t think it’s realistic to imagine the top leadership of the firm being involved in field operations with nobody minding the store at headquarters. (Of course, the author’s purpose demands that Pia be in the field; and the premises of action heroine fiction not infrequently do strain believability a bit.) But these weren’t deal-breakers!
Pia’s a stellar action heroine for the 21st century, and I’m already a committed fan who wants to read every book she ever stars in. My recommendation doesn’t carry the weight that genre author Zoe Sharp’s does; but nevertheless, I’m proud to add my endorsement to hers.
Note: There’s no sex in the book; and though some characters do at times use profanity and obscenity in their speech, the author does exercise a degree of restraint with this.
Author: Seeley James
Publisher: Self-published, available through Amazon, both for Kindle and as a printed book.
A version of this review previously appeared on Goodreads.
And Frankenstein Created Woman? That might have been an alternate title, with German scientist Dr. Serafin (Jurgens) in the role of the creator – he’s a man with a dubious past, and whispers of involvement in Nazi experimentation. Now “rehabilitated” to the US, in what may be a medical version of Operation Paper Clip, he uses an unholy mix of pharmaceuticals and extreme training methods to convert his own daughter, Goldine, into a 6’2″ athletic superwoman, with the aim of completing an unheard of triple crown at the upcoming Moscow Olympics, winning the 100, 200 and 400 metre gold medals. To fund this work, he brings in a consortium of businessmen who aim to capitalize on Goldine’s success with advertising, merchandising, etc. Brought in to advise them, as Goldine is prepared for her first public events, is agent Jack Dryden (Coburn), who gradually realizes the one person not wholeheartedly committed to the entire proceedings, is the runner herself.
I never really think of the Dutch as the organized crime type, but this film convinces me otherwise, based as it is on actual events from just before World War II. Oss is a town in the Southern half of the Netherlands and, it appears, everyone there is on the take one way or another, from insurance scams to larger scale shenanigans, all the way up to the mayor and the local priest. The federal government has sent military police to the town to keep order, but that only rankles the locals, for the cops are Protestants and they are Catholics. Johanna (Hoeks) hopes to escape a life of crime, planning to open a restaurant when her husband, Ties (Schoenaerts), gets out of jail. But it’s not as easy as it seems. Her spouse is happy to pimp her out, and local boss and Ties’s uncle, Wim de Kuiper (Musters), drags him back into his old ways. When Ties tries to force Johanna to have an abortion, she hatches a plan to have him killed by her lover (and client), Jan, although the plan only puts her deeper in the clutches of de Kuiper. But when she discovers just how low he is prepared to go, she decides he and the rest of his cronies are going down.
The back-story behind how this was made is, in some ways, more interesting than the film itself. The star and co-writer was working as a stripper, and came up with the idea, almost as a coping mechanism to handle some of the creeps with whom she had to interact. Funding came from a customer at one of the clubs. But, unfortunately, it turned out that the money he was “investing” was actually being embezzled, leading to a two-year crawl through post-production – it still hasn’t received an official release in its American home. Made in 1997, it looks like a fossil from an earlier, much scuzzier era, with both its grimy New York locations and feel harking back to the work of Abel Ferrara.
2013 was perhaps a landmark for women in action films. with the top slot at the American box-office going to Jennifer Lawrence in Catching Fire. But also present in the top five was this, which kicked Katniss’s arse for critical acclaim, snaring 10 Oscar nominations to Fire’s… Well, none at all, actually. That’s probably a little starker contrast than is accurate – they are respectively 97% and 90% Fresh at Rotten Tomatoes – but it is interesting to compare the two films and their approach. In Gravity, the sex of the lead character simply isn’t very relevant: you could switch it to being a man, and you wouldn’t need to change much, not even the name – Ryan Stone. I’d be unsurprised if told that, like Salt, this was originally written for a male lead. Indeed, it also fails the infamous Bechdel Test of feminism, passing none of its three criteria – though this says more about Bechdel’s uselessness than Gravity, I feel (Run Lola Run also goes 0-for-3, and it’s not the last thing it has in common, as we’ll see).
If the first Queen Bee movie was a fairly effective romp through the genre, that’s a lot less the case fot the follow-up, with Ike largely floundering around, as Maki, the leader of the Pearl Gang, who finds herself embroiled in a battle with another crew, the Black Lilies and their leader, Yuri (Kazama). Their spat is interrupted, when the Kuroji clan of yakuza throw their weight behind the Black Lilies. However, the triumph of the Lilies is short-lived, as they find out that they are about to be forced into life as prostitutes, for the benefit of their new allies, ending their life of freedom in the ‘hood. There are also subplots in which Yuri’s former boyfriend, Eizo wants to be a top racing driver, bringing him into conflict with the yakuza as well, and a suitcase filled with stolen guns.
Reiko (Ike) is leader of the Athens Gang, a low-level all-girl gang, who specialize in car thefts and rolling naive salarymen with the lure of hot sex. They’re part of a hierarchy, which includes a male gang under whom they loosely operate, who are in turn on the fringes of a Yakuza group. There’s also a motor-cycle gang and its leader (Taki) who don’t obey anyone, and that independence is really what Reiko wants, even though her group is obliged to follow certain rules, such as not getting attached to any man. Things are disrupted by the return of former leader Jun (Kagawa) from reform school: will Reiko be able to hold on to her position? It’s just one of a large number of plot threads here: you also get the blackmail of a pop star; a hitman agreeing to one last mission; a gangster estranged from his wife and daughter; sex on motorcycles for no apparent reason; a journalist with a nose for scandal; and, of course Reiko failing to follow her own rule about no attachments.