A lot of people have praised Robert Ferrigno’s Assassin books to me, but I’ve always resisted reading them. The books are (if you haven’t heard of them) set in a near future in which Islam has become dominant in the United States. Since I figure there’s a good chance this will actually happen in my lifetime, I see no reason to experience it sooner than necessary, even vicariously.
But when the non-Assassin book The Girl Who Cried Wolf (available as an e-book only) showed up for three bucks for Kindle, I thought I’d give it a chance. Maybe I’d be so impressed I’d be motivated to tackle Ferrigno’s magnum opus.
Alas, I don’t think that will happen. I find myself in a strange position here. I have no serious criticisms to make of the book. The writing is professional, the characters interesting, the plot full of suspense. And yet I didn’t enjoy it much, and was glad to be done with it.
The plot is simple on the surface. A group of eco-terrorists decide to kidnap attorney Remy Brandt, daughter of an investment tycoon. The plan calls for one of them to murder Remy’s boyfriend, a policeman named Mack Armitage, but he fails in that, only the first in a series of errors that will prove fatal in the end.
Reviews gave me the impression that this book would be lighter than it is, that there’d be a sort of “Ransom of Red Chief” quality to it. There’s some of that, but I never found it very amusing or satisfying. Mack is an adequate hero, but of course he can’t be allowed to be too heroic, because just rescuing Remy would be unfashionably patriarchal.
Author Ferrigno has a reputation as “the most un-PC author in America,” but I didn’t see much of that here. The eco-terrorists are depicted as being in the wrong, but most of them are well-meaning and merely the dupes of masterminds whose motives have nothing to do with Mother Earth. The vilest person in the story is someone every leftist will be happy to hate. So I didn’t see much here that was subversive of mainstream prejudices.
And when it comes down to it, I guess I just don’t like stories about hostages and prisoners. That’s purely a personal reaction, based on my own history. You may like The Girl Who Cried Wolf more than I did.