{"id":17992,"date":"2023-03-21T19:30:38","date_gmt":"2023-03-21T23:30:38","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/?p=17992"},"modified":"2023-03-21T19:30:38","modified_gmt":"2023-03-21T23:30:38","slug":"21-hours-by-dustin-stevens","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/?p=17992","title":{"rendered":"’21 Hours,’ by Dustin Stevens"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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Felix \u201cO\u201d O\u2019Connor,<\/strong> hero of Dustin Steven\u2019s novel, 21 Hours<\/a><\/em>, is an ex-con, now a cowboy in Wyoming. He rarely gets back to Columbus, his home town, but keeps in touch with \u201cLex,\u201d his twin sister. He doesn\u2019t much care for her husband, but he adores their daughter Annie, his niece.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

He gets a call from Lex one day, asking for help. She and her husband were attacked, and Annie was abducted. There\u2019s been no ransom demand, and they don\u2019t have a lot of money anyway.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

O gets into his car and drives straight to Columbus. If it\u2019s not a ransom kidnapping, it must be human traffickers. Investigating that will mean going to bad places and dealing with very bad people. O can handle himself, and he won\u2019t let anything stand in his way.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Essentially, this is \u201cTaken,\u201d with an uncle instead of a father, and the locations changed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

21 Hours <\/em>is another example of the recent phenomenon I guess I\u2019d call the \u201cmade for the movies thriller.\u201d It involves the sort of action we usually accept in the rushed context of a movie, but (at least for me) doesn\u2019t work as well on the printed page. Our hero suffers excruciating, repeated physical trauma over the course of his adventure, but just keeps on coming, killing multiple enemies who are fresher and in better health than he is.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I suppose that\u2019s all that\u2019s left for the male hero these days. We\u2019ve decided, as a culture, that women can fight men on equal terms, that there is no male strength advantage. All that\u2019s left to a man is his ability to take punishment. So he gets punished beyond all plausibility.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

One other quibble I have with this book is that on two occasions the hero opens padlocks by shooting them with a pistol. I\u2019ve never tried the experiment myself, but I have it on good authority that you can\u2019t actually do that.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But other than that, the writing was good. 21 Hours<\/em> is an entertaining book, if you\u2019re into this sort of thing.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Felix \u201cO\u201d O\u2019Connor, hero of Dustin Steven\u2019s novel, 21 Hours, is an ex-con, now a cowboy in Wyoming. He rarely gets back to Columbus, his home town, but keeps in touch with \u201cLex,\u201d his twin sister. He doesn\u2019t much care for her husband, but he adores their daughter Annie, his niece. He gets a call … Continue reading ’21 Hours,’ by Dustin Stevens<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[7,15],"tags":[4616,816],"class_list":["post-17992","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-fiction","category-reviews","tag-21-hours","tag-dustin-stevens"],"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17992","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=17992"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17992\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17993,"href":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17992\/revisions\/17993"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=17992"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=17992"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=17992"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}