Three Strikes

Joe Hunter has spent his life working for -- sometimes unknowingly -- a sort of global intelligence initiative called Arrowsake. He's semi-retired now, recuperating from wounds suffered in a previous mission. Then Don Griffiths, a man with whom he has a not-so-fond past while working with Arrowsake, calls him for help. Griffiths' daughter has died in a car accident, but he thinks it was murder, at the hands of a former Arrowsake target who's supposed to be dead. Joe at first doesn't believe Don, but events soon help him change his mind, and he's on the run with Don and his family, squaring off against a crew of violent hired killers who outnumber and outgun him about ten to one.

Blood and Ashes is the fifth Joe Hunter novel from former police officer and security consultant Matt Hilton, and follows in its predecessors' path of action, action, action and then a little more action. Although technically not 100% following his injuries, Joe has a pretty simple operating plan for dealing with bad guys: 1) Point. 2) Shoot. If those are not available, they may be replaced with Stab, Punch or Kick.

You have to know a lot of the history from the earlier Joe Hunter books in order to get a good handle on him, and the places where Hilton pauses to catch you up on it show he's a lot better at writing Shoot, Punch, Stab or Kick than dialogue and exposition. The story is strangely disjointed, with characters and set pieces appearing for no real reason except to provide targets for the aforementioned Four Horsemen of the Joepocalypse. The Hunter novels don't do anything to single themselves out as really poorly written or executed, but they don't do much to single themselves out as better than average, either. You'll probably have a hard time recalling much of the book once the last page turns over.

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Kay Hooper's "The Bishop Files" tells stories of a semi-secret paranormal unit investigating crimes that involve psychics or psychic phenomena. With The First Prophet, she branches out beyond the Bishop novel characters and adds in elements of a much wider conspiracy, involving a shadowy group that seems to be amassing psychics for some nefarious scheme. But there's also a group that's opposing them, and both are trying to secure a hold on newly-developed psychic Sarah Gallagher. After she was mugged and struck on the head six months earlier, Sarah finds she has developed a strange second sight, some of which involves knowing the future.

Novelist Tucker Mackenzie has his own reasons for trying to find a legitimate psychic, but he arrives in Sarah's life just as it seems she is targeted in some kind of plot. Do the plotters seek Sarah's death, or just Sarah? No one knows, and the pair will have to use all the cleverness they can manage in order to stay ahead of the hunters and survive.

The First Prophet is either an extended chase scene broken up by expository lectures, or an extended expository lecture broken up by chase scenes. The characters are not particularly distinguishable, the in-narrative logic of the psychic phenomena not particularly solid and the writing not particularly noteworthy. The ending obviously sets the stage for a series of sequels, but not very much about The First Prophet intrigues me enough to want to read them.

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So many U.S. printed books carry the tagline "international bestseller" it's kind of interesting to encounter someone whose internationalizing started from somewhere else. Arnaldur Indriðason has been publishing crime and thriller fiction in Iceland for more than 15 years and has had a couple of his novels made into movies. One, Mýrin, was made into the 2006 movie Jar City, Iceland's entry in the foreign-language film category of the Academy Awards.

His popularity has risen enough that translations of some of his earlier work have begun being released in the U.S., including the 1999 Napóleonsskjölin, translated by Victoria Cribb and printed in 2011 as Operation Napoleon. Napoleon opens with a 1945 plane crash on an Iceland glacier; a German plane with both German and American officers aboard.

Fifty-five years later, a secret U.S. Army operation is underway to recover the wreckage, recently resurfaced because of ice shifts and storms. A young man named Elías sees the operation and then disappears, but not before calling his sister Kristín and telling her about it. Now mysterious men pursue Kristín with possibly deadly intentions, and she has to unravel the puzzle of the plane, the U.S. detachment and where to find her brother while staying one step ahead of the men chasing her.

Napoleon was Indriðason's third novel and doesn't represent the much smoother story-telling skills he would demonstrate as he progressed. Kristín's chase seems scattershot and her ability to elude capture and locate the recovery operation a lot better than a bureaucrat should have. Indriðason puts three or four anti-U.S. Army rants into her dialogue for no real reason and ignores the simple fact that a quick in-and-out operation to recover what's inside the plane -- which is want the U.S. forces really want -- would have been simpler, less likely to be discovered and a whole lot more sensible.

It's hard to say much about the style, since it's a translation. Whether the flat blandness of the novel comes from Indriðason or from Cribb as she rendered it into English is tough to tell, especially since I speak exactly one word of Icelandic if you count "Reykjavik." And since that's the capital city of the country, you probably shouldn't. Napoleon is a shade more than below average, leaving a reader on the fence about pursuing further Indriðason novels. But if found used, they're probably worth the time.