Tough Guys, Tough Reads

If you enjoyed Chad Zunker's debut, The Tracker, and want to pick up the second book in his series about former foster child Sam Callahan, make certain you check the title and date before you start it -- because Shadow Shepherd is so similar to it that you might grab the wrong one.

Either way, you're going to watch Sam -- now a lawyer -- get stuck in a hazardous situation when a semi-clandestine but legal job turns into a criminal conspiracy that has him stuck at the center of it. Sam is on the run once again, pursued by people who seem to have a keen interest in him disappearing without a trace. This time he's back with his girlfriend Natalie, but that proves to be more of a minus than a plus when shadowy forces kidnap her and tell Sam to do what they say or else she will be killed.

Shepherd is in so many ways a retread of Tracker that Zunker has Chad ask himself how he keeps getting into situations like this. Natalie, a reporter, winds up in the hands of evildoers because she has the stunningly stupid habit of meeting anonymous callers late at night without any backup, watcher, self-defense strategy or situational awareness.

Sam has a number of interesting features that could make him a great character, such as his juvenile criminal history and foster family background. The series could be interesting because it takes its characters' religious faith seriously. Zunker includes some interesting domestic touches in the life of Sam's lead FBI pursuer that show he wants to write about real people more than ciphers. But as long as the stories keep having Sam break ribs in one scene only to fistfight a few hours later, or create a super-assassin who's so well-known his nickname is on CNN but who eludes law enforcement at every turn, or similar ridiculous credibility collapses, there's no point in sifting through them for the good stuff. Shepherd's ending, which is supposed to give context to what's all happened before, only doubles down on how unnecessary it is to read both it and Tracker. And without some reason to expect improvement, there won't be much reason to read either of them or any of the ones that follow.

-----

James Reece is home from a disastrous mission in Afghanistan. He and the other members of his SEAL team were ambushed on a mission that never felt right from the start, and only two of them survived. When the higher-ups start asking him questions about how the debacle happened, he gets a definite sense they are looking to hang the failure on him. Rotated back to the States, he barely lands before learning that his wife and young daughter were killed in what police call a random home invasion. But Reece knew he was delayed in getting home and that he was supposed to have been there when the murderers arrived. More and more things are adding up, but they're adding up the wrong way and he finds himself under the gun, on the run and with just a handful of people he can trust. His enemies could stretch into the highest levels of the government, but that won't matter once Reece has established their guilt; their power won't keep them off of his Terminal List.

List author Jack Carr is a retired SEAL and brings great verisimilitude to the scenes of combat and his action sequences with Reece. Armament, tactics, procedures -- all carry a real aura of authority. His pacing is good, although there are plenty of first-novel bumps and stumbles. Some time and experience will probably help polish the rough edges and help Carr find ways to move his story forward without resorting to action thriller clichés, and List offers some hints of something there worth polishing.

The major drag on that possibility is Reece himself. Reece is obviously driven by vengeance against a hidden conspiracy of power-hungry people who wiped out first the men under his command and then his family in an attempt to cover their tracks. When he visits violence on those people, we might be a little taken aback by the level of it but the idea itself is part and parcel of the story we've bought into.

Unfortunately, more than once Reece demonstrates a willingness to threaten those outside the conspiracy in order to get to his targets, including their own spouses and children. In at least one other place, he also displays a callousness towards folks who have become enmeshed in his problems because they were trying to help him. Those things may be plausible or they may not, depending on the reader, but they definitely take readers out of his corner and drain away sympathy they may have felt for him.

The polish that comes with practice will be a pretty natural progression if Carr writes more stories about James Reece. Being a little more aware that a protagonist's threatening of one child to help take vengeance for his own is a good way to make a reader say good-by will be a choice. We'll just have to see which way Carr decides to lean.