Guns for Hire-The Modern Adventure Thriller Read online

  Reacher Rides In

  Men are supposed to read crime novels by men and women similarly choose writers of their own sex. But the most cursory examination of this canard shows how it really doesn’t hold up: PD James and Ruth Rendell can both claim legions of male readers, while Thomas Harris has as many female readers as male. But what about Lee Child? Surely he’s aiming squarely at a male readership, what with the testosterone level and violence of his books cranked up to the max? Actually, no. As Child always intended, his hero Jack Reacher has great appeal for women and Child’s publishers are even re-jacketing his thrillers to maximise this female readership (with ‘softer’ edges to the lettering – that's apparently what in publishing logic attracts women readers). The balancing act of male/female appeal is less assiduously pursued in Bad Luck and Trouble than in previous books – characterisation is here, it wouldn't be a Lee Child novel otherwise, but the book is more plot-driven than most recent Reachers – and it’s none the worse for that (though some may yearn for a little of the breathing space of earlier books). If you recognise the title as a lyric from a song, then you know your American blues. But if you don’t, don’t worry – you'll get a crash course here in all things American. In books such as Tripwire and Killing Floor, Child’s tough-as-nails protagonist has become one of the most appealing of contemporary heroes, and, of course, readers now expect the vivid American locales that really set the seal on the books – particularly impressive in light of the fact that the author is as English as his hero is American. As we know from previous books, Jack spent a tough 13 years in the army’s military police division, where he honed his survival skills. He’s lost contact with his old colleagues but he’s not forgotten the unspoken bond that links them all. Then Jack receives a message: one of his old unit has been discovered dead in the Californian desert. He’s approached by a fellow ex-cop, with a view to re-forming the unit to discover what's behind the death, but there's a problem: where is the rest of the unit?

  Child ensures we’re as concerned as Jack is with the decimation of his old unit and the set pieces (including a violent clash on a helicopter) are orchestrated with the usual authority.

  Child has steadily – and inexorably – built up one of the most devoted followings of any current thriller writer – and it’s not hard to see why. In books such as Killing Floor and Die Trying, Jack Reacher is shaping up to be one of the most enduring of contemporary heroes and his laconic, hard-boiled appeal is easy to fathom. The Enemy will unquestionably receive the usual plaudits and so it should: this outing for Jack Reacher is Lee Child at his considerable best. Set before the other books, this one has Reacher finding himself in North Carolina on New Year’s Day, 1990. In other parts of the world, history is being made, see the tearing down of the Berlin Wall. But Reacher, a Military Police Duty Officer, is dealing with a baffling case: a soldier has been found lifeless in a downmarket motel and when Jack visits the house of the soldier (a general, in fact) to break the news to the dead man’s wife, he finds she is also dead. Soon, dark happenings in another part of the world are setting off ripples in the States and Reacher is up against the hardest – and most dangerous – task he has yet encountered. As a picture of the early life of Jack Reacher, this is totally successful and has all the energy and drive of Child’s best work.

  The author customarily produces one novel a year featuring his tough ex-military policeman Jack Reacher but Bantam Press felt obliged to announce that there would be a very speedy follow-up to 61 Hours – possibly to forestall an army of irate Reacher followers, dismayed by the fact that their hero seemed to be dead at the end of his latest adventure. Of course, authors have pulled this particular trick before (Ian Fleming had James Bond appearing to have his licence to kill cancelled by the poison-tipped boot of Rosa Klebb at the end of From Russia With Love – the book, not the film, that is; unsurprisingly, 007 was quickly back in harness). And here’s Worth Dying For, with Jack Reacher in the land of the living, having survived the explosive denouement of the last book.

  After Child's maverick hero has shrugged off the Grim Reaper, he makes his way south to the hinterlands of Nebraska. It's winter, and cold. The town he arrives in is ruled by the autocratic Duncan family and all fight has been drained from the demoralised townspeople. In a run-down hotel, he meets the town's doctor, an alcoholic who has a well-developed instinct for self-destruction. Reacher drives the doctor to a house where the duo encounter a brutal case of domestic abuse and it isn't long before Jack is dispensing the kind of rough-hewn justice (against the customary insuperable odds) that readers know will always make an appearance in a Lee Child novel. He is soon a man on the run, with the ruthless Duncans baying for his blood. And the Duncans themselves have some sinister associates whom even they can’t afford to make angry.

  Child, like Ian Rankin, is a craftsman who complains about the low status accorded to genre writing (compared with the respectability bestowed on ‘literary’ writers). Perhaps both men should simply revel in the fact that so many people respond to a key aspect of their talent – one that Child has in generous measure. His is an ironclad storytelling ethos, a gift for narrative that grips like the proverbial vice. Certainly the chilly Nebraska landscape here, with its frost-covered barns and crop-starved fields, is ably conjured and the cowed townspeople economically but sharply characterised. Reacher, as ever, is sui generis – a violent force for good set down by the author to eliminate evil and move on. But what counts is Child's ability to keep the reader turning the pages – and if anyone can put down Worth Dying For after the first few pages, they shouldn't really be reading thrillers at all.

  The Thriller Writer’s Thriller Writer

  Fear the Worst? Isn't that what all good crime novels should make the reader feel for the beleaguered protagonist – vicariously, at least? Linwood Barclay is adroit at the strategies of putting the reader through the wringer via the problems of his central character and it’s a trick that Aristotle knew all about: catharsis. Certainly, that feeling of being thoroughly purged, in a strangely pleasant way, is precisely what Barclay’s writing delivers, very much in the fashion of the Canadian author’s earlier No Time for Goodbye – a considerable success in Britain. Barclay’s hero, Tim Blake, wakes up to what he thinks will be an ordinary day. It will, in fact, be a prelude to a nightmare. His teenage daughter, Sydney, is staying with him while holding down a job for the summer at a nearby hotel. He is suffering the customary divorced parent’s guilt and is hoping for a bonding period with his daughter. He is not worried when she does not return from the hotel, assuming that she is spending time with friends. But then it becomes clear that she is not coming home at all – and to his horror, he finds that nobody at the hotel where Sydney Blake was supposed to be working has heard of her. The nightmare has begun and in a deftly modulated progression from unease to tension to terror, Barclay takes the reader towards Tim Blake's final engagement with some very sinister people. It’s a journey in which Blake is obliged to reassess everything he thought he knew about his daughter and, inter alia, himself.

  There is a particular kind of popular writing, unpretentious and couched in functional prose, which has just one agenda: to stop you turning off the bedside lamp, however heavy your eyelids. Ira Levin was the exemplar in this field with such books as A Kiss Before Dying and the expertly-crafted Rosemary's Baby. Linwood Barclay isn't quite in the Levin class yet but on the evidence of Fear the Worst and the earlier and frankly, better Too Close To Home, it won’t be long before he has hopped up to that exalted category of popular fiction. It has to be said that Barclay takes his own sweet time in building the levels of apprehension here and some readers may become a little impatient. But those on board for the author’s slow-burn tactics will find that considerable dividends will be paid.

  Too Close To Home, as mentioned above, is one of Linwood Barclay’s most accomplished novels. The Cutter family is devastated when their next door neighbours the Langleys are murdered in
their house, ruthlessly gunned down. The Clutters struggle to come to terms with the horror of the event but something else is in prospect for them: it appears that the murderers went to the wrong house. And young Derek Cutter has been hiding in the crawlspace under the house – which means that he has heard all the horrific events. His father, Jim Cutter, discovers that the boy has recently worked on their old computer (along with Adam, the son of the murdered family) – is this fact somehow behind the killings? Any reader who has been lucky or well-briefed enough to have encountered Linwood Barclay before will not be surprised to hear that this fraught scenario with numerous unguessable twists is dispatched with consummate skill. As with every novel by this author, the tension is brilliantly orchestrated.

  A train crosses the Missouri state line, a man clinging to the side of a cattle car. Three other men, shabbily dressed, also hold on. Their eyes are peeled for the freight boss who, if he catches them, will 'whale them raw’. This is the powerful opening to Robert Jackson Bennett's debut outing Mr Shivers, arriving on these shores festooned with the kind of praise rarely visited on first novels. And it isn't very long before the reader may begin to agree with that chorus of approving voices. It's the time of the Great Depression in the USA and the man hitching a ride is Marcus Connelly. He has little to live for except revenge; his daughter has been savagely killed and Connelly has left Memphis to search through the hobo camps and abandoned townships that now litter America, chasing a scarred, wraith-like figure who is known only as Mr Shivers. Connelly gathers around him (without really trying to) a motley collection of tramps and damaged people, all of whom have had similarly ruinous run-ins with the 'gray man’. As they close in, there will be much bloodletting and the act of revenge (for Connelly and his companions) may prove as destructive for them as for their nemesis.

  Bennett’s novel is as riveting in its slow-burning accumulation of tension as it is atmospheric in its period evocation. And even for those who shy away from such fare, the element of the supernatural is persuasively handled – firmly keeping scepticism at bay.

  This is very much a book with its own identity but there are two authors (one dead and literary, one alive and populist) hiding in the shadows here: John Steinbeck and Stephen King. The economical, persuasive characterisation and the sudden, shocking outbursts of horror owe not a little to the master of contemporary frightening fiction, Stephen King. But the brilliantly realised picture of dustbowl America is firmly in the tradition of the author of The Grapes of Wrath – and it's not stretching the point to say that, at times, Bennett's stinging but hauntingly poetic prose aspires to the quality of Steinbeck's best work. In fact, if the truth be told, it is this element rather than the supernatural trappings which makes the book so memorable. This terrifying odyssey through a blighted period in American history will stick in readers’ minds for a long time after reading Bennett's authoritative debut.

  Box of Pleasure

  Those who have encountered the rangy American writer CJ Box (‘Chuck’ to his friends) on his visits to the UK have been charmed by his amiable, good ol' boy country manner, finessed by an ever-present cowboy hat guaranteed to garner attention in the literary salons of London. While it wouldn't be true to say that all of this is a sham (Box is the real thing: living in rural Cheyenne, Wyoming, he is also a rancher, hunter and guide to the outback) there is actually more to him than these George Bush accoutrements might suggest. Apart from anything else, Box is considerably better read than the gun-toting ex-president and to continue the presidential parallels, echoes Obama in being a man familiar with William Faulkner.

  Such vintage writers as John Buchan of The 39 Steps and Geoffrey Household of Rogue Male may also be on Box’s reading list, as Back of Beyond sports the same vibrant response to countryside and nature against which tense chases take place, as his venerable British predecessors. In fact, it is this talent for marrying locale to accumulating tension which has perhaps created such a massive following for the author in his native USA. Box accrued even more UK enthusiasts as the publisher Corvus continued its ambitious programme of issuing the writer’s considerable back catalogue.

  Back of Beyond begins on a rainy day in the Montana mountains in a burnt-out cabin. Inside, a charred corpse smoulders. Detective Cody Hoyt, a man with the customary baggage of personal problems including alcoholism, is the investigating officer and finds complications in the fact that the body is that of his AA sponsor, Hank Winters. The idea that Hank has died accidentally after a return to the bottle is discounted by Cody. Drinking has led to Cody himself being disgraced in the department – particularly when he wounds the county coroner after a stakeout goes wrong. Even though he is suspended, the dogged Cody is not about to let the murderer of his friend enjoy his liberty. The killer is on a horseback trek into the heart of Yellowstone National Park and to add even more frisson, Cody’s alienated son is also on the trek.

  The texture that comes from CJ Box’s assertive storytelling skills and channelling of the great writers of the past (accomplishments he is wont to play down) complements the sheer excitement of dark doings against a threatening landscape. And while our initial response to the economically characterised Cody Hoyt may be ‘Oh no, not another alcoholic detective!’ readers will soon find themselves disregarding the cliché, such is Box’s ineluctable grip.

  That grip is also keenly in evidence in Blue Heaven. Bad things can happen in Blue Heaven. It is the name given to the idyllic countryside area of North Carolina where many people choose to retire, including policemen from Los Angeles. But LA cops, as we know from both real-life and a great many novels, are not always to be trusted. In CJ Box’s utterly irresistible novel, two children on a fishing trip in the woods witness a horrifying murder and find themselves on the run, pursued by the four men responsible. Alfred Hitchcock always used to say that it was important to tell the audience why his desperate heroes could not go to the police and Box pulls off that trick here: the four killers are, in fact, highly respected retired policemen. Apart from their extensive training, the murderous cops have another weapon in their armoury when tracking these inconvenient witnesses: they can call their pursuit a ‘missing child’ investigation. Who, after all, could doubt their honesty? And how could the rather weak-willed local sheriff refuse their help in such a case? But an ageing rancher who becomes involved might just put a spanner in the works...

  Those who have encountered earlier novels by CJ Box (including the equally tense Three Weeks To Say Goodbye) will be in no doubt that he is one of the most talented thriller writers at work today and the fulsome praise on the jacket from such luminaries as Harlan Coben and Tess Gerritsen is fully justified. If anyone is put off by the notion of the old-school cowboy Jess Rawlins drawn into the chase, or worries about the ill-advised Stetson sported by Box in the author picture, this is only peripherally a Western – above everything, it’s an exhilarating modern thriller. It's not just the mechanics of keeping the reader turning the pages that the author is so skilled at, it's the wonderfully rich characterisation of all the protagonists here, good and evil. In particular, the retired rancher Rawlins is a marvellous creation (if a film is ever made of the novel, the now-elderly Clint Eastwood would be perfect casting). A sense of place leaps off the page but however beautiful the setting, we are never allowed to forget the menace that is drawing ever closer to the desperate children. Blue Heaven is over 400 pages long but you will read it as quickly as a slim novella.

  Howard Blum’s The Brigade may not have represented a breakthrough for its author – but deserved to. In November 1944, the war in Europe is in its final days. The British government has agreed to send a brigade of 5,000 Jewish volunteers from Palestine to Europe to combat the German army. Israel Carmi is one of these soldiers, a veteran of the Haganah underground. Carmi serves one army but his allegiances are to another. Another soldier is Johanan Peltz, brought up on a massive estate in Poland, longing to return home as an officer in the British army. And t
here is ex-student Arie Pinchuk, whose return to Europe conceals his own secret plans: he is determined to rescue his little sister, the last remaining member of his family. At the Senio river, Peltz leads his troops in a dangerous bayonet charge at the heart of the German line. The brigade survives and triumphs in the bloody hand-to-hand combat, proving that even as the Jewish race is suffering appalling victimisation, these soldiers with the Star of David on their uniform sleeves demonstrate that a persecuted race can fight back. But after the war, when the total horrors of the holocaust become clear, the soldiers vow to inaugurate a savage campaign of vengeance - one that may change the course of history. This is powerful, vividly written stuff: an epic tale of the fighting of war and the forging of a nation. As a thriller writer, Blum is in the highest echelons – and the verisimilitude of the detail here adds a whole new level to this impressive novel. Writers such as Joseph Heller, Mary Higgins Clark and Clive Cussler queued up to sing the praises of The Brigade – and it’s not hard to see why.

  The thriller aficionado has cause to be both grateful and weary at present. Grateful because so many strongly written thrillers are appearing and weary because it takes a dedicated reader indeed to get through all of them. Well, that dedicated reader has another book to add to the bedside table and John Case’s The Eighth Day more than justifies being bumped to the top of the list. Case made a mark with such books as The Genesis Code, and this is truly thriller writing on an epic scale, the narrative goes globe-trotting from the Eternal City to Istanbul and from the high-tech avenues of Silicon Valley to the corridors of power in Washington. But what makes this book so unusual is the blend of religious aspects in the high-octane mix. Case’s protagonist, artist Danny Cray, is making money on the side as an investigator when a rich lawyer asks him to find out who is behind the vilification campaign directed against a reclusive billionaire. When following a lead, Danny comes into contact with the files of a dead professor of religious studies, and realises that the stakes are far higher than his client told him; so high, in fact that massive loss of life on a cataclysmic scale may come about if Danny's unable to overcome the forces ranged against him. Danny Cray is a nicely vulnerable hero whose resourcefulness carries him through and the elements of the international thriller and Omen-style eldritch terrors are cannily synthesised here, making for a highly compelling read.