The voice on the other end was like dark chocolate that smoked and drank too much and didn’t give a d**n.
If you crossed Rex Stout’s Archie Goodwin with Ian Fleming’s James Bond, you’d pretty much get Alex Mason, hero of Odin, the first volume in a series by David Archer and Blake Banner.
Alex Mason is an agent for “Odin,” an officially nonexistent espionage agency operating for the US government. Its head is known as the Chief, but he’s sometimes called “Nero,” an obvious hat-tip to Nero Wolfe, of whom he is a near clone. He summons Alex to his office as Odin begins, telling him that he’s concerned about an agent he’s had in place in Manila, who has suddenly disappeared. That agent was part of a small, strategically placed cell of assets working against the Chinese. And now it seems they’ve been discovered.
In fact, as Alex arrives, Chinese agents are already moving against the cell. Quickly one is murdered, two go on the run together, and another is captured. Alex needs to find the two fleeing assets and get them to safety. As he begins that task, he is joined by a friendly – and gorgeous – female Mossad agent.
In terms of writing craftsmanship, I find no fault with Odin. The characters were sharp and interesting, and the dramatic tension escalated steadily. The prose was often delicious, with lines like, “He turned and strutted over on crisp little feet.”
The plotting impressed me very much. A plot development that looked like implausible coincidence turned out to be perfectly plausible, by neat authorial jujitsu. An apparent contradiction resolved itself, paying off in heightened suspense for the reader.
I was less happy with a moment of justification of adultery, but I’ve overlooked worse moral sins in a novel.
Bottom line – Odin was a superior thriller, crafted with high professionalism. It was a good time with a book, well worth the purchase price.
I had run out of bargain books that I’d picked up through online deals, and noticed a Harry Bauer book by Blake Banner. And I thought, “I haven’t read a Banner for a while. I wonder why I stopped following him?” A check of my past reviews gave no clue, so I bought LA: Wild Justice, the 7th installment in the series. It proved entertaining in a popcorn movie way, but I also was reminded why I’d given Harry a rest.
Harry Bauer is a professional assassin working for an ultra-secret agency called Cobra. His bosses call him in for an assignment: they want him to kill a saint. The saint in question is Sen. Charles Cavendish, a billionaire who famously bankrolls a number of much-needed relief organizations around the Third World. He feeds the hungry, provides clean water, cares for the sick, etc.
In fact, according to Harry’s bosses, he operates those charities only as a blind. The entrée he gets to many corrupt countries permits him to sell drugs, arms, and chemical weapons to some of the world’s worst actors – including Harry’s worst enemy in the world.
But Harry has hardly begun his job when one of his bosses is kidnapped. Now it’s a race against time to complete the sanction and rescue his friend.
Harry is a hero very much in the James Bond mold – and I mean the movie Bond, not the one in the Fleming books. He effortlessly subdues very formidable enemies, even in groups – until the plot points call for a dramatic setback. He suffers traumatic injuries and just fights on. Pain barely slows him.
LA: Wild Justice was fun, mindless entertainment. What annoyed me – and this is probably why I dropped the series before – is that the author likes to leave the reader with a cliff-hanger. That just annoys me. Stand-alone books should wrap up the main plot. There can be larger, ongoing plots over a series of books, but you owe it to the reader tie up the threads on the main problem in the volume in hand.
Still, an entertaining book. Moderately recommended. I’m likely to read the next eventually.
I’ve been following, and enjoying, Blake Banner’s Harry Bauer series of action thrillers. The Silent Blade is the sixth in the series. It delivers all the action you could ask for, though it’s probably best not to think about it too much.
Harry Bauer is a covert operative for a shadowy private organization called Cobra. His particular passion is wiping out drug lords. In the last book he got rid of two at once, and now he’s on the run in Trinidad, cut off from his employers, trying to figure out a way to get back to New York without alerting either the law or the cartels.
Then he meets a beautiful woman who works for the CIA, who first helps him and then turns him over to her bosses for “enhanced interrogation.” They want to recruit him, they explain, but first they need to know who he’s been working for. He finally escapes from them and runs to the leader of a Colombian cartel, offering (he claims) to be their source inside the CIA when he goes to work for them. Here he meets another beautiful woman, and fireworks (of a couple kinds) follow.
The action is hot and heavy, the sex pretty much the same (though not too explicit). But I can’t resist noting that the plot doesn’t make a lot of sense. Harry has reached a stage where he seems to just jump into deadly situations without a plan for survival. Are we supposed to think he’s a master strategist, or does he just have a death wish? I have a suspicion we’re not supposed to think that far.
Good of its kind. Cautions for language, violence, and adult situations.
I recently reviewed a novel that I found a little difficult to read. Blake Banner’s Immortal Hate was not like that at all. It was fast and easy and very quickly finished. Popcorn reading, well done according to its kind.
Harry Bauer, hero of Immortal Hate and the other books in the Cobra series, is an international assassin working for the customary shadowy international organization. His brief is to eliminate the worst of the worst monsters in the world. He’s good at it, and remorseless.
“The worst of the worst” certainly applies to General Kostas Marcovic, fugitive Serbian warlord, who was guilty of one of the greatest atrocities in the recent Balkan troubles. Now he’s been identified as living under a pseudonym on the Caribbean island of St. George. Harry’s orders are simple – go in, kill the man (make it look like an accident if possible) and leave without making a fuss.
That, however, is not Harry’s style. On the ferry to the island he meets Helen, an attractive woman who runs a bar on the island. Helen senses that this is a dangerous man, and sets about enticing him to help her friend Maria extricate herself from the affections of a local drug lord. Harry is in no way reluctant to help out – he has a particular hatred of drug merchants – but Helen is not prepared for the swift and ruthless way Harry will go to work.
But that’s just the beginning. It turns out there are two old Serbians living on the island, and each claims the other is the real Marcovic.
On top of that, there’s a hurricane coming.
Over the top, lightning-paced and morally problematic, Immortal Hate was the equivalent of a Hollywood action movie. I enjoyed it, but I’m not entirely proud of myself for it.
Kristofer and Gry Molvaer Hivju. Photo credit: NRK
I have some dislocated thoughts I’m going to try to coordinate in this post tonight. Just subjective responses to a couple recent entertainment experiences. They may or may not mean anything to you.
The picture above is of Kristofer Hivju, a Norwegian actor who’s attained high visibility since appearing in the Game Of Thrones miniseries. Beside him is his wife, Gry Molvær Hivju, who is a documentary film maker. They constitute, as you’ll note, a striking couple.
I heard about a documentary series they made together, and watched it recently on the Norwegian NRK network feed, using a VPN. I don’t know if it will ever be offered outside Norway. The series is called simply “Olav,” and it relates a personal quest to find the historical truth about Norway’s patron saint, Olav (or Olaf. Best known, of course, as a character in my novel, The Elder King) Haraldsson. We learn that Kristofer first learned of Olav as a boy, when his father, also an actor, played Olav in the annual Olav play presented (most years) near Trondheim, Norway. He tells us that Olav has been his hero all his life – the Viking who became a Christian king, and converted his country.
I’m not sure how seriously to take the dramatic arc of the series. Hivju may be playing a role as he presents himself as a lot like a little boy, shivering with excitement to go where his hero went and see all the evidence of his life. His disappointment is palpable as he travels to England, France, and Russia and finds – generally – that evidence for Olav’s life (outside the Icelandic sagas) is pretty sparse. Judging by the evidence, Olav was a fairly minor player on the European scene until after his death, when Norwegian churchmen and chieftains promoted him and his saga for political reasons. (I note that no mention whatever is made of the work of Prof. Torgrim Titlestad, whose book, Viking Legacy, I translated. They even report that a Norwegian translation of the Icelandic Flatøybok has recently been released, but they don’t mention its publisher, Saga Bok, Prof. Titlestad’s publishing house, or even let us see a copy).
The final resolution of the whole thing (and I’d have bet my house that this would be the case) is that they conclude that history and faith are different things, and each is important in its own realm. I reject that principle in terms of the central affirmations of Christianity, though I don’t doubt that many false stories have been told of saints and holy men over the years. I wondered about Hivju’s own faith, which he never really explains. Does his faith include Olav’s God, or only Olav as a hero? None of my business, I suppose.
Around the same time, I was reading a couple books by Blake Banner, whose Cobra series of thrillers I’ve enjoyed very much. So I picked up a couple from his Dead Cold Case series, which I’d started and given up on for some reason. Reading again, I remembered why. I’ve never encountered a more God-bothered series of books, and in a bad way. In each of these books (as far as I could tell) the author felt it necessary to insert a few Awful Christians. Judgmental, repressed, joyless, hypocritical, and often criminal. His knowledge of Christianity seems to come primarily from a bad experience of Roman Catholicism – when he describes an American Methodist Church, he assumes that they cross themselves when they enter the church, call their services masses, and reject sexual pleasure as sin. I feel sorry for whatever bad experience the author must have had, but I couldn’t take much of it.
We live among the ruins of shattered faith today. Those who believe, generally believe in a subjective way that has little to do with the real world. Those who don’t believe seem furious at God for not existing. We who hold onto Christianity have lots of work to do. It may be illegal work, before long. But that’s how Christianity started, after all.
“Of course you are. You’re James Bond cleverly disguised as an inbred redneck.”
“Thanks, I love you too. Actually, in my experience, most rednecks I have met were very fine people with solid values. And the worst inbreds I’ve met were among the European aristocracies and the Boston Brahmins.”
Harry Bauer, hero of Blake Banner’s Cobra series, is an assassin working for a private security firm that contracts to the government (for deniability). He is deadly and efficient and ruthless, but he has a code – he only kills the worst of the worst.
So he’s surprised when, as Quantum Kill opens, his bosses call him out of a well-earned vacation, asking him to do a job entirely outside his wheelhouse. There’s a woman (they won’t tell him who) at a certain place in Canada. Harry is to pick her up and transport her to Washington DC by a certain date, by a devious route he can work out for himself.
When he finally meets the woman, she’s a puzzle. She’s attractive, but strangely distant and affectless. She makes no effort to make friends, but soon they have more to worry about than their relations, when hit teams locate them – they can’t figure out how – and Harry has to do what he does best to keep her alive. It gets more puzzling when he figures out that the hit teams are CIA.
As they take a roundabout route as far out of their way as the Azores, the barriers between them start to break down. But more is going on than Harry and his employers have been told, and in the end he will resolve the problem through doing what he does best, in a shocking but oddly satisfying climax.
I’ve read some of Blake Banner’s books outside the Cobra series, and I was disappointed in certain attitudes and plot elements, especially in religious matters. But in this series, I haven’t had that problem – such opinions as Harry Bauer expresses generally please me.
I’m torn a bit as to how strongly I should recommend this series to our readers. In terms of reading pleasure, it’s top notch. My interest never flagged from the first page to the last (and as I grow older, flagging interest is a problem I have increasingly as I read). But the violence is harsh and stark and uncompromising. I feel a certain amount of guilt for enjoying it so much.
A man wakes up, sitting in a Jeep in the desert. He has no idea who he is.
All he knows is that he’s a killer. A highly trained, efficient killer (He becomes known as Verdugo, the Executioner). In the next few days he will have plenty of opportunity to do what he does best. He will tangle with the US military intelligence and drug cartels, and meet a woman to whom he is drawn, who knows who he is but won’t tell him.
All the elements of a pretty compelling thriller are here in Verdugo Dawn. Lots of action, plot twists and setbacks, an intriguing protagonist.
But the book didn’t work for me. Although I’ve enjoyed Blake Banner’s work, I had trouble with the latest of his series I tried, due to repeated targeting of the Catholic Church as a villain. Religious matters also turned me against Verdugo Dawn. The narrative is interrupted in a couple places by references to Carlos Castaneda and dream-like dialogues with an old wise man named “Olaf” who talks a lot of solipsistic physics that we’re expected to view as profound.
Also the action was often implausible. And there were lots of spelling and homophone errors in the text.
Conor Hagan was hard to miss. He was six four and looked like Michaelangelo’s less talented cousin had made him out of concrete.
I bought the collection of the first four Dead Cold Mystery books by Blake Banner, so I coasted right on into the third book, Garden of the Damned.
New York City cold case detective John Stone is intrigued by a 12-year-old file on another old unsolved murder. He notices something in the crime scene photos that eluded investigators at the time – who don’t seem to have worked the case too hard. The victim appears to have been a homeless man, shot and abandoned in a dumpster. But Stone notices that the man had an expensive haircut and manicured nails. This was no street person. This was a prosperous man who was murdered and then re-dressed, to mislead the police.
Along with his partner, Carmen Dehan, Stone starts asking questions, learning that the victim was a missing person – a wealthy young man who had been a devout Catholic, working tirelessly to help the poor. He and his fiancée had disappeared at precisely the same time, and no one had known their fate until now.
But why was he killed? The detectives learn that he was looking too closely into dark secrets being guarded by very powerful men, including men of the Church.
As always with Blake Banner’s books, Garden of the Damned was easy to read and fun. Some of the writing was very good, though plausibility wasn’t always high. Some very dark matters are touched on, and the Roman Catholic Church does not come out looking well at all.
The gray drizzle had turned to heavy rain, with huge, broken clouds dragging in off the Atlantic like ripped sails from some cosmic Trafalgar.
The second volume in Blake Banner’s likeable Dead Cold Mystery series is Two Bare Arms. It is autumn, and our heroes, John Stone and Carmen Dehan, New York cops who don’t play well with others but find they make a good team, have selected another old case from the files. This one concerns a pair of human arms (female) found twelve years ago in an East Bronx “lock up” and never connected to any case, body, or missing person. The suspects include a reclusive, somewhat creepy computer geek, a thuggish motorcycle gang member, and a Satanist. The case will not lack for false trails, lies, or danger.
I like a lot of things about this series. Stone and Dehan make an interesting team – lonely people silently reaching out to each other, though in denial about it. A man and a woman who have no friends, and so care all the more fiercely about the one friend they each possess – the other.
Also, whenever they have a chance to eat, they tend to eat steak, with relish. This raises them immensely in my estimation.
And the prose is sometimes superior.
I’m not so keen on the plotting. There are a fair amount of improbabilities, and genuine police procedure is a distant glimmer.
But it was fun. Cautions for language and adult themes.
He blinked, but it was probably just his time for blinking that month.
Having discovered the pleasures of reading Blake Banner, and having exhausted the available books in his Cobra series, I moved on to his Dead Cold Mystery books, about a pair of police detective partners in New York City. An Ace and a Pair was not as much fun as the Cobra books, in my estimation, but entertaining, and with some superior moments.
John Stone is a successful detective with a high case clearance rate. But his superior doesn’t like him. Aside from personal animus, she considers him a dinosaur who ought to retire and make way for younger people. So she assigns him to the Cold Case squad, and partners him with Det. Carmen Dehan, a very attractive (of course) Jewish/Mexican officer with an attitude problem. They mesh immediately, united by their mutual dislike for their superior and a visceral commitment to going to any length to solve cases. There’s some sexual chemistry too, but they both avoid that issue.
The first case John selects is a bizarre one. Ten years ago, a gangster named Nelson Hernandez was found dead at a poker table, along with his chief lieutenants. Each had been shotgunned to death (though Hernandez himself was also grotesquely mutilated), and apparently not one of them moved to defend himself. The chief suspects have solid alibis. Also, the crime made no sense. It didn’t seem to profit anybody.
Stone and Dehan delve into the evidence, which involves a fair amount of travel (even a trip on a gangster’s private plane). Only Stone’s intuitive detective work will enable them to cut through a lot of lies and subterfuges and put some old wrongs right.
Although author Banner employs his trademark technique of jumping quickly into the action, without a lot of preliminary stage setting, the story didn’t take off for me until a little way in. But it grew on me, and I started to care. I had a vague idea what the outcome would be, but a number of impossible problems needed solving first.
I thought I found a couple weak spots. At one point, Stone locates a vital clue through driving around in Texas – which seemed to me an improbable needle-in-the-haystack thing, considering the size of Texas. Also, the author used “begs the question” wrong, which disappointed me. This guy’s better than that.
But it was an enjoyable novel with a satisfying conclusion. Recommended, with the usual cautions.
