Suspense stories, espionage thrillers, crime novels and the like all revolve around some potentially harsh stuff. Our hard-boiled or deep-cover heroes sometimes have to break some rules or heads in order to save the day or solve the crime. Some of what they do can be a little ugly to read, but we handle it when it's done to make sure the hero can win or when it's not something the writer lingers on. The ugly incident happens and then the story and we readers move on.
But sometimes the whole book is ugly, and you just can't wait for it to be over. Perhaps it's the killer's point of view sequences a lot of suspense thrillers seem to like, or the creepy extended scenes in which the writer uses the voice of the victim to describe his or her -- usually her -- own death. James Patterson is one of the best(worst?) examples of this; two of the deaths in his new novel Swimsuit are tailor made to be filmed by Eli Roth or fit into a Saw movie.
Michael Walsh's Hostile Intent is his first thriller. He's previously written music criticism and a few novels, including a sequel to Casablanca called As Time Goes By. In Intent, he introduces Devlin, a super-spy so secret that when the novel opens, even the President doesn't know he exists. Devlin is called in when terrorists invade a school in an Illinois town and hold hundreds of students and teachers hostage. He in turn calls on his special operations unit, who only know him by phone and e-mail, since none of them have ever met him. Although the rescue is mostly successful, the suspicious late triggering of the explosives signals to Devlin that something else is going on and that flushing him into the open may have been part of the plan.
Intent is ugly through and through. Not a single character is anyone you want to root for. Devlin is supposedly our hero, but after a woman he fatally shoots in his home turns out to have been an FBI agent, he "felt bad about the woman. But that was the job." Walsh racks up a high body count, especially of his female characters. He's also partial to reruns -- two different innocent bystanders at different terrorist attacks die the same way, from projectiles through their eyes and into their brains. He dwells a queasily long time on some of the atrocities the terrorists commit.
Some of this might be marginally more acceptable if Intent were a better book. It's difficult to know what's happening at any given time in the story, which might be fine for philosophical literature but destroys an action-suspense thriller. Devlin out-gadgets James Bond, to a degree that's narrative deadening. He has the lastest and bestest Jargon Mark V Gear, but so does the other side, so the suspense is supposed to hang on whether or not he can babble his techno before his enemies techno their babble. Secret rooms in public restrooms, secret switches on sinks, wiretaps that can pretty much hear what people think, powerful guns that must, must be described in exact detail nearly every time someone uses them, blah blah blah.
Vince Flynn's Term Limits is a fast-paced suspense novel with an ugly plot. A group of former military operatives decide that one of the biggest problems the United States faces is its own corrupt leadership. So they kill some senators and congressmen, and threaten to kill more unless the remaining leadership does serious work on a balanced budget and criminal justice reform, for starters. But Congressman Michael O'Rourke, himself a retired Marine, feels he may know who this shadowy group is and he also fears he may have given them the information that influenced their choice of targets. He's also conflicted, because the men who died were definitely a part of the problem in Washington, D.C. Term Limits is Flynn's first novel, and features some of the people we will later see in his Mitch Rapp books. Flynn nails some of the backroom scheming and gamesmanship that the politicians begin to try to play with this crisis, even when their own lives are at risk. And although he's got a few too many, "I can't tell you over the phone, you'll want to drop what you're doing and meet me" scenes, he was already able to zip the action along.
The problem is that his heroes are men taken it upon themselves to force the government to do what they want it to do. What they want it to do may make sense -- and they may be the only terrorists ever to include the phrase "zero-based budgeting" in their demands -- but nobody asked them to and no one gave them the right to take the law into their own hands. Allusions to the Declaration of Independence and to the Founding Fathers fall short; the Founders were duly elected representatives of the people of the American Colonies who met in public rather than hide behind assassins' masks. It's unappetizing and makes it difficult to care about even our protagonist O'Rourke, since he sympathizes with the assassins and even begins, at one point, to work with them.
Even so, Term Limits outdoes Hostile Intent, which Walsh intends to be the first of several books featuring Devlin. When I finished Limits, I stacked it up to donate to the local book drop. When I finished Intent, I dropped it straight into the dumpster.
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