A Quiet Man, Tom Wood

Author Tom Wood is wrestling with the difficulties of making an amoral anti-hero the protagonist of a book series. On the one hand, he can't allow too much character development unless he's ready to wind up the series and start on something new. When the series has been successful, as has his "Victor the Assassin" novels, the publishing industry is not always happy with that unproven new ground.

But on the flip side, he has to have some movement for his lead, or else every story turns into another couple hundred pages of Victor running surveillance detection routes, demonstrating the kind of paranoia you'd probably need if you were an international assassin and killing a half-dozen or more people either between him and his target or between him and his getaway. The average reader can't really connect with an anti-hero protagonist who remains amoral throughout a series. Donald Westlake wrote 16 Parker novels as Richard Stark up through 1974, with his pseudonym outselling his actual name. But then he hit a spell when he had little to say with the character and the next new Parker novel didn't show up until 1997.

Wood has dipped a toe in Victor's "good side" before, such as in Better off Dead where he tries to protect an old colleague's daughter, or A Time to Die, when he employs his skills against an evil man in order to remove him from the world and not just to get paid. In both cases he's violent and lethal, though his ultimate goal is a little less tarnished than usual. But Wood always lurches back, either unable or unwilling to put any consistency into a real arc of character growth. His books aren't any less repetitive than, say, Lee Child's, but Jack Reacher can keep readers coming back because his goal, besides being left alone, is to put the bad guys down. After awhile, it's hard to root for a lead character whose goal is the death of people he doesn't know so he can get paid for it -- and who's willing to kill any random person who might lead to him being caught.

A Quiet Man does dig more into Victor's past than Wood has ever done before and makes a bold early move that helps us focus more on Victor as a person than as a killing automaton. The driving element of the narrative doesn't really relate to his current assignment -- in his cover identity he is stirred by meeting a young special-needs child and makes a promise to the boy and his mother. When they vanish he wants to find them, both to assure himself that they are OK and to fulfill his promise. His ruthless adherence to his profession's best practices cross purpose with his equally fervent drive to keep his word and, for some reason he can't understand, he chooses keeping his word despite the potentially fatal consequences.

Wood drizzles the biographical sprinkles into the story with a light touch, and solidly connects them to actions Victor subsequently takes. Victor's somewhat loftier goal doesn't lessen his own frigid lethality and almost sociopathically violent tactics.

Unfortunately we have to go the long way to get to our resolution with some sidetracks that are clearly filler. A Quiet Man isn't really more than a novella in disguise as a full novel, as Wood even deploys the old standby of starting the action in media res before flashing back a few days to tell us why everyone's where they are and what they're doing, in order to be able to repeat a sequence and lengthen the page count. A set piece with the mobsters who hired him also adds page count more than anything else.

A Quiet Man was a welcome comeback after a three-year hiatus in the series, but we'll have to wait to see if Wood solves his seesaw problem between making Victor merely bad and making him worse than bad, and to see if he has some more fully-developed stories awaiting release from his keyboard.