Tag Archives: Brett Battles

‘Mercy,’ by Brett Battles

I’m a fan of Brett Battles’ novels about covert operations “cleaner” Jonathan Quinn, and the spin-off Night Man novels have been fun too. The Night Man is Nate, Quinn’s associate, who has taken up a sideline in his spare time – essentially being Batman. Along with his sort-of girlfriend Jar, an Asian woman on the Autism spectrum who does the computer stuff, he intervenes to help people who need help, but can’t be helped by the law. It’s nice, and his relationship with Jar is quite sweet. Nate is motivated to these actions by the voice of his ex-girlfriend, Lisa, who is dead. Nate doesn’t believe in ghosts, but the voice always seems to be right.

But I was a little disappointed with the latest Night Man book, Mercy. Because this one takes Nate and Jar out of their usual urban environments into American flyover country. And they don’t look good there – in my opinion – though I’m sure they see it differently.

The Cleaner team is on suspension right now, so Nate and Jar have more time for their vigilante activities. Unfortunately, those activities have begun to attract media interest, which they don’t want. So they decide to get a small Winnebago and take a road trip. Jar has never seen much of the US.

At the Grand Canyon, guided by Lisa’s voice, they hike along the edge of the Canyon and rescue a teenaged boy who is stuck on a ledge just below the brink. When the boy returns to his camper, he is cruelly punished by his father. Nate and Jar do not hesitate to make this guy their target, following the family to their home in Mercy, Colorado, planning to document his abuse and turn the evidence over to the authorities.

However, they soon discover that the man is involved in plenty of other shady activities. There’s a criminal conspiracy under way, and Nate and Jar are on it, whatever the danger.

The adventure in Mercy was up to Brett Battles’ usual high standards. What I didn’t like was Nate’s attitude. He looks at these small-town people and has nothing good to say about them. They’re too white, they use the wrong pronouns, they’re not worried enough about Covid masking. As a resident of the Midwest, I found all this condescending. Nobody in the town is depicted positively, except for the abused kids.

I won’t be boycotting Battles’ books, but I hope he sticks in the future to people he understands and can sympathize with.

‘The Vanished,’ by Brett Battles

I’m a fan of Brett Battles’ Jonathan Quinn series of thrillers, about a “cleaner” – a man who works as a contractor for espionage agencies, getting rid of evidence – and bodies – for them. The latest book is The Vanished.

Nine years ago, Quinn and his team attempted to provide protection for a brilliant scientist, in part as a favor to her sister, who was an agent. The job went bad, and the scientist was spirited away (not involuntarily, I might add). Since then, the agent sister has been inactive on the job – obsessed with finding and rescuing her sister.

But now Quinn and his team have been temporarily sidelined by their employers. Shocking news from France motivates them to travel there and try to rescue the sister on their own. This will involve merely getting past the security of one of the most technologically advanced corporations in the world.

The main thing that distinguishes The Vanished as a story is that author Battles decided to set it in 2020, incorporating the whole business of Covid-19 lockdown protocols. That makes some things harder for them and some things easier, but did not (for this reader) make the story much more interesting. As you know, I’m a reader who likes character-driven stories. The Jonathan Quinn series is generally pretty good in that department, but this story was mostly about procedures and technology. I didn’t find it compelling.

But it’s a good series. You might like this one better than I do.

‘Insidious,’ by Brett Battles

Brett Battles is the author of a successful series of thrillers about a covert operations “cleaner” named Jonathan Quinn. I like that series very much. Insidious is the second book in a spin-off series about Quinn’s former assistant, Nate (have we ever been told his last name? I can’t recall). Quinn and Nate have kept their distance from one another to an extent since the death of Liz, Nate’s girlfriend and Quinn’s sister. So Nate is operating on his own more often now.

In Insidious, Nate is out jogging in the Hollywood Hills one morning when he spots a backpack discarded beside the path. Investigating, he finds the dead body of a young woman at the bottom of a hill. After helping the police with their investigation, Nate figures that’s that.

But his Thai friend Jar feels differently. Jar is a young woman, a computer genius with autistic traits who has been slowly coming out of her shell and growing closer to Nate. Jar shows a surprising interest in the case. This girl, she discovers, was living under a false identity. She was actually the central character in a sensational police case some years back. She had been kidnapped and held prisoner for months, then had miraculously escaped, though her captors were never identified. Now she has been murdered. For very personal reasons, Jar grows obsessed with discovering who killed her, and making sure they face justice.

What can Nate do but help her? Along the way he will not only learn the shocking motive behind the girl’s kidnapping and murder, but also some painful secrets from Jar’s own past.

I found Insidious totally engaging, and moving in parts. I recommend it highly. Cautions for the sort of things you’d expect.

‘The Unknown, by Brett Battles

Jonathan Quinn and his team of international agents return in The Unknown, the 14th book in the series. Regular readers will know what to expect, and author Brett Battles delivers.

On a winter night in Austria, a very important scientist named Brunner is traveling under the protection of bodyguards provided by the Office, the private security firm our heroes work for. It should be a routine mission, but they are attacked, there is loss of life, and Brunner is expertly extracted by kidnappers. This is bad news for the Office, which has only recently reconstituted itself as a business, so their operational chief contacts Jonathan Quinn. Though ostensibly a Cleaner, a wiper of evidence after “wet” operations, Quinn has a well-earned reputation for effective and efficient field work. He summons his regular team, including his wife Orlando, his old partner Nate, and a couple East Asian friends. As a concession, they allow Kincaid, the failed bodyguard, to come along. He has something to prove.

They face well-organized, efficient, and well-financed opponents, but Quinn always finds a way. This time out they are assisted in particular by Jar, a minor character in previous books. Jar is a Thai computer genius, a woman. She is obviously autistic, but is learning to deal with illogical normals. She provides a surprisingly charming addition to the cast.

They also get unexpected – and suspicious – help from a source they neither understand nor trust, though it seems to be leading them in the right direction.

Like all the Jonathan Quinn books, The Unknown was fun. It wasn’t deathless literature, but it offered interesting interactions and a fast pace. Recommended.

‘Rewinder,’ by Brett Battles

I don’t read a lot of science fiction, but I got a deal on an SF book by Brett Battles, whose mysteries I’ve enjoyed. So I gave it a shot. Rewinder wasn’t bad at all.

Rewinder is a time-travel story. It starts in an alternate universe where the United States never won its independence. Instead, our hero, Denny Younger, lives in a British empire in which society is intensely stratified. Born a lowly “Eight,” Denny has little to look forward to in life beyond a manual factory job. However (to his father’s alarm) he tests high in history. And the day after finishing high school, he finds himself taking the entry test for the Upjohn Institute. That enterprise ostensibly does historical research to verify the genealogy of upper-class individuals hoping for prestigious appointments.

But that, Denny learns, is only the public face of the thing. In fact, Upjohn employees are time travelers. They go back in time to observe people’s ancestors and learn their dirty secrets. They can then use those secrets to blackmail their clients, bringing in government grants and preferential treatment for the corporation.

But one of Denny’s trainers, Marie, senses something uncommon in him. She gives him hints that she and (perhaps) some others are sometimes going beyond their instructions – “doing right” rather than just “doing well.”

When Denny makes a bumbling mistake and erases his own timeline entirely, replacing it with one that will be familiar to you and me, he will be faced with a shattering decision – “fix” his mistake or choose a better world.

Rewinder was a fun book. I’ve done some time travel writing myself, and it makes my head hurt, so I can only imagine the kind of labor it must have taken to plot out the many paradoxes here. Science fiction fans, especially, will enjoy Rewinder.

‘The Damaged,’ by Brett Battles

In the latest installment in Brett Battles’s solid Jonathan Quinn thriller series, he takes us on a diversion back in time. The Damaged is a prequel, telling us what happened before Jonathan Quinn first appeared in The Cleaner.

Jonathan Quinn, if you’re not familiar with him, is a “cleaner.” That is, he’s one of the guys who cleans up the scene after a government agency assassinates or abducts somebody. In The Damaged, he’s still building his reputation. He’s efficient, honest, and thorough in his work. He owes his career –and his life – to his former mentor, Durrie.

But Durrie’s star is in decline. Always a gruff and surly type, recently he’s become erratic. He takes shortcuts at his work, and blames his mistakes on others. His narcissism is devouring his personality.

Quinn wants to help him, both for friendship’s sake, and for the sake of Durrie’s girlfriend, Orlando, with whom Quinn is silently in love. So when he gets an assignment and is asked to take Durrie along as his helper (a demotion for Durrie), he agrees, hoping to help him get his footing again and reinstate himself.

But Durrie has his own plans. In the classic style of bad characters, he’s incapable of believing in virtue in others. If Quinn is helping him, he must have ulterior motives. He must be planning to move in on Orlando.

Durrie is going to thwart this “plot.” And he doesn’t care who gets hurt along the way.

The Damaged was a pretty good story in a dependable series. Its chief defect is a somewhat anticlimactic ending, but that’s because it’s setting the scene for The Cleaner. New readers will find it a decent introduction to the series, and old fans will find it entertaining.

‘Night Man,’ by Brett Battles

I’m a big fan of Brett Battles’s Jonathan Quinn series of thrillers. I’m less enamored of his recent X-Coms spin-off series, which is heavy on Girl Power™. But I was eager to read his new spin-off in a different direction, Night Man, starring Quinn’s partner, Nate (I’m having trouble finding Nate’s last name. I wonder if it’s ever mentioned).

As you may recall, Quinn and Nate are “cleaners,” employed by covert agencies to clean up things that might constitute evidence at scenes of action – anything from fingerprints to bodies. Their partnership suffered a setback a couple years back, when Quinn’s sister Liz, who’d been helping them out, got killed. Liz had also been dating Nate, and he and Quinn were inclined to blame each other. That break has been mended to a degree, but it’s left a space in Nate’s life. He now fills that space by living a secret life, more or less as Batman.

A psychologist might argue that Nate has suffered a psychotic break, because he hears Liz’s voice talking to him. She directs his attention to crime stories in the news, and he applies his spy skills to locating the criminals and stopping them. He does this for Liz.

This time Liz directs him to the story of a young girl seriously injured in a hit-and-run accident in a northern California town. The accident turns out to be no accident at all, and Nate will uncover a monstrous evil hidden discreetly away in an innocuous setting.

Author Battles is extremely good at creating appealing characters, and can be quite funny. (I especially enjoyed the conceit of using very short chapters, a technique I’ve never had the nerve to try.) The writing is generally good, though I can’t resist noting that he misuses the term “begs the question” once. I would have hoped for better than that, but otherwise I have no complaints.

Recommended. Language and situations are adult, but not terribly shocking. Night Man is a fun thriller.

‘The Excoms,’ by Brett Battles

The Excoms

I’ve grown fond of Brett Battles’ Jonathan Quinn novels, but I resisted trying his spin-off series, which begins with The Excoms. I noticed in the descriptions that it involves a special operations team made up mostly of women, and I feared it would be a “you go, girl” fest.

Sadly, I was right.

“Excoms” is short for “Excommunicated.” The members of the team are experts in various covert activities (legal and illegal) such as assassination, hacking, and driving. Each of them has suffered some bad luck, and is now in danger of death or imprisonment. A mysterious group called The Committee rescues each of them, brings them together, and offers them well-paying work doing what they do best for good causes.

Their first job is the rescue of a group of children from a gang of kidnappers. The story is tightly plotted, the action and dialogue are crisp, and the story is compelling.

I just didn’t like the basic concept.

I don’t know if author Battles is doing penance for some misogynist transgression, but he has produced a very stereotyped story – stereotyped in the contemporary manner. There are five members on the team – three women and two men. Each of the women is smart, competent, deadly, and efficient. Of the men, one is a good driver, but shows no particular flair. The other is a narcissistic womanizer who can’t follow instructions and messes up repeatedly.

This “girls rule; boys drool” approach annoyed me a lot. So although the book was well-crafted, I won’t be following the series. I’ll probably continue with the Jonathan Quinn books, though.

Cautions for mature stuff, but not too bad. It might be noted that there’s a possible homage to Chesterton here, as the members of The Committee are designated, not by name, but by a day of the week.

‘The Fractured,’ by Brett Battles

The Fractured

When I discovered there was a new entry in Brett Battles’ enjoyable Jonathan Quinn series, it was the work of but a moment for me to download it for my Kindle. The Fractured is an enjoyable thriller, like all its predecessors.

When The Fractured begins, our hero, Jonathan Quinn, and his wife Orlando are still recovering from the disaster that occurred in the last book – where an important member of their team died. Not only did they lose that person, but there was a rupture with Quinn’s old protégé, Nate, who has vanished.

But the bills need to be paid, and they’re delighted when they’re contacted by an old friend, who is trying to revitalize the secret semi-government office that used to employ them as “cleaners” (removers of evidence after “wet ops”). There’s a chance to get inside the compound of a white nationalist militia. This job gets done successfully.

But there’s a bonus. What they find in the compound gives them a chance to nail the money man who’s been funding the group. And not only can they get him, but they might also get a mysterious international arms merchant, a man who keeps his identity so secret that few have ever seen his face.

But one of the few who has is the missing Nate.

If they can locate Nate and persuade him to cooperate, they may be able to prevent an apocalyptic disaster in the United States.

The Jonathan Quinn novels are neither deep nor fancy. But they’re fun and they move fast. Recommended. Cautions for language and violence, but not as bad as many.

‘Little Girl Gone,’ by Brett Battles

Little Girl Gone

I’ve become a fan of thriller writer Brett Battles, especially his Jonathan Quinn novels. I get the impression that Little Girl Gone is an early novel, penned before he really found his narrative feet. It’s OK, but was not a grabber, for me.

Logan Harper works as a mechanic in his father’s garage, in his home town in California. Not so long ago he was a mercenary, working for a Blackwater-style military contracting company. But one awful day things went very wrong, and Logan’s best friend got killed. Logan was made the scapegoat. In the bad dreams that have tormented him ever since, he also blames himself. So he went home to lick his wounds.

One morning on his way to work he stops at the café run by “Tooney,” his father’s Burmese immigrant friend. Logan intervenes just in time to save Tooney from being murdered – but Tooney insists they mustn’t call the police. Eventually he learns the truth – Tooney’s granddaughter, a student, has been kidnapped by agents of the Myanmar government, who want to stop the girl’s mother from political activities. At his father’s request, Logan promises to bring the girl back. He doesn’t know at that point that this will involve traveling to Thailand and connecting with underground forces. But he’s made a promise, and he also needs to prove something to himself.

There was nothing really wrong about Little Girl Gone, but I didn’t find it compelling. The plot seemed artificial to me, and the characters were pretty black and white. Author Battles can do better, and has proved it since.

But it’s not a bad book. It’s lightweight. I can recommend it in a mild-mannered way. I don’t recall any seriously bad language or subject matter inappropriate for, say, teenage readers.