Double-Naught Spy Stories!

First, a few bullet points:

1) Brad Thor deserves kudos for putting some ladies kicking tail into the driver's seat of an international intrigue action thriller. The Athena Project is also the name given to a special Delta Force unit comprised of four straight-shooting, no-nonsense red-blooded American women who use their own gifts and abilities to handle missions differently than a squad of male operatives would do -- and sometimes better.

2) Brad Thor deserves a solid gong for the way he writes his female characters. Take a paint-by-numbers late-run Charlie's Angels episode, mix it with either of the loud and empty movie versions of the same, and sauteé in the kind of conversations adolescent males wish girls had when they were alone with no men around and they were being badass, and you have the four operatives of Athena.

Here, the lethal ladies are on the trail of some recently rediscovered Nazi technology that's already fallen into the wrong hands, which are swiftly trying to get it up and running for their own nefarious purposes. On the way, they match up against a sleazy arms dealer, Czech thugs and an Eastern European criminal leader affiliated with a shadowy organization bent on world dominion. The story moves quickly enough and Thor has a gift for high-tension action scenes, but you almost have to recast the way he writes women characters as satirical in order to diminish the temptation to sail the book into an opposing wall. Which brings us to a final bullet point:

3) He's getting better, but every time I read Brad Thor I'm reminded of how much I'm going to miss Vince Flynn.

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It's a fact that, except for some long-established brand names like Cussler, Clancy or van Lustbader, many thrillers seem to be written by guys with one-syllable names. Which apparently presented a problem for English freelance video editor and non-fiction writer Tom Hinshelwood, so the magic of the pseudonym transformed him into Tom Wood, author of three books to date about the ruthless and exceptionally skillful hitman known only as Victor. The Killer is Wood's first novel, first published in Europe as The Hunter.

We meet Victor as he completes a fairly routine assignment, but Wood swiftly upsets the applecart as the assassin's keen senses note a hit team waiting for him at his hotel. A tautly-written and quite bloody shootout over several floors and a couple of buildings follows as Victor tries to get himself free of the hit team and learn who hired them. The problem for a man who has relied on his solitude and isolation to keep himself safe from trouble is that he has almost no help when that trouble finally comes, and Victor will be forced into some unnatural alliances in order to learn who's hunting him and make sure he turns the tables before he becomes some other assassin's high-priced victim.

Wood's not a master stylist, but he has a good gift for moving his scenes and chases along quickly without his prose getting in the way. There will be few times when the reader might be energized by a particular phrasing or sequence of sentences, but there are even fewer when clunky dialogue or amateurish description clog the narrative.

Since debuting in 2011, Wood has spun two more tales of the surnameless assassin Victor, which are definitely worth checking into. Readers with qualms about a killer for hire as a protagonist can be somewhat comforted by the fact that, in these adventures anyway, Victor is mostly killing bad people. We don't have to believe he's not a bad guy, but at least his victims to this point were either trying to kill him or were even worse guys.