Tom Barber, author of Return Fire (part of the Sam Archer thriller series) is apparently a very young man. So I suppose I should cut him some slack in criticizing his prose. He seems to have been pretty successful as a novelist (which I certainly can’t claim), so he must be doing something right.
Return Fire, which I got through a free offer, is another example of the genre I call… what do I call it? I forget. Tonight I’ll call it Movie Thrillers in Print. The idea is to give readers the same irrational thrill they get from a John Wick kind of movie. The story won’t stand up to much logical analysis, but there will be thrills galore.
Sam Archer, our hero, is a former London policeman who moved to America (he has dual citizenship) to join the FBI, then joined an antiterrorist unit in the New York City Police Department. He is engaged to Alice Vargas, a member of the same squad (how did they work that?), but she went on vacation to Spain after a lover’s quarrel. Now she’s been kidnapped, and evidence suggests she’s being held in London. Sam and several of his friends from work are assigned to fly to London and assist in the investigation (we’re supposed to believe a cop would be allowed to work a case involving his fiancée). But little do they know they’re all being maneuvered into a kill zone by a vengeful master criminal.
Plausibility is not a high priority here. As in action movies, our hero and his friends suffer incredible physical punishment (including one guy being technically dead for a couple minutes) and just keep on fighting. About a ton of lead gets expended through firearms, both Glocks (all handguns are Glocks) and automatic weapons, but somehow only peripheral characters get killed, at least at first. Cars get shot to pieces before – eventually – somebody thinks of shooting out a tire to stop one. A pistol shot is used to open a padlock (safety tip: you can’t generally do that).
Aside from logic problems, the prose was weak. The author has a university degree in English and should know not to misplace his modifiers. Example: “Dressed in tracksuit bottoms and a sweat-stained t-shirt, blood was spattered on a white wall.” (You’ll note that the sentence is telling us how the blood was dressed.) There are awkward lines like, “Before long, what had been lying just under the surface between them had quickly caught fire.”
And finally, the author has an annoying tick of not knowing when to quit. He likes to close chapters with a zinger, which often doesn’t zing but just weakens the previous line with a redundancy. For instance, he says of the kidnap victim, who has spent a terrifying day in brutal captivity:
She’d never been to London before and so far the jury was out on whether she’d ever want to come back.
Today hadn’t exactly been the most pleasant of welcomes.
Now re-read that passage without the last line. Works better, doesn’t it?
However, I did finish Return Fire, so I can’t claim it wasn’t readable. Author Barber is young enough that he might possibly someday refine his craft.
