The Final Hour
Tom Wood (Sphere $34.99)
English writer Tom Wood and his killer-for-hire hero Victor consistently deliver some of the best assassin fiction around.
This is the seventh in the series - Victor's been doing black-bag jobs for the CIA; there's a changing of the guard in Washington and suddenly Victor's more liability than asset. Is his only option hooking up with a former enemy Raven - who makes a return from 2015's The Darkest Day - to out-manoeuvre them? The Final Hour spends almost as much time with Raven as it does with Victor, which is fine, but the book lifts when Victor's on the page. This is a man who gets his suits cut baggy so he can move easily, and even when he undresses has a set routine to keep him alert to attack at all times; he'll switch sides in a heartbeat if the money is good and trust isn't in his vocab. As usual the combat set-pieces are superb - particularly when Victor out-wits an entire team of night-vision wearing hit men with a wet dust sheet. Recommended.
Camino Island
John Grisham (Hodder & Stoughton $34.99)
Grisham has two books out this year - this, the first, is a detour from his usual legal thrillers. It's a clever and often compelling caper novel set in the world of antiquarian bookselling, told in Grisham's unmistakable measured, patrician prose.
A rag-tag group of thieves break into the Princeton University library and steal five hand-written F. Scott Fitzgerald manuscripts - and yes - Gatsby is among them.
Grisham opens with the heist then moves through others involved in alternate chapters. Slowly the plot and the tension builds, one senses Grisham is having fun here as he wryly details members of the local beach town literary community - the playboy bookseller, the well-reviewed but poverty-stricken novelist Mercer - who hasn't gotten over turning up to her author's reading and finding an empty room - the assorted cripes and jealousies of the wanna-be and has-been authors. This is the best part of the book - gossipy, colourful and full of energy. Less successful is the winding up of the plot - which seems rather perfunctory after such protracted introductions - and the bad guys never really come to life at all. It'll make a fun movie though.
Since We Fell
Dennis Lehane (Hachette $34.99)
After the excellent Joe Coughlin trilogy Lehane gets back to modern times in this somewhat confused psychological thriller. It begins with our heroine Rachel shooting her husband and then proceeds to back track focussing on her search for her father. It meanders for 80 or so pages before Rachel, now a tv reporter, is sent to Haiti. There she suffers an on camera breakdown and an old acquaintance Brian Delacroix comes back into her life and nurses her back to health. Soon she's even able drive across town without having a panic attack and it's while out on one of these rare excursions that she sees her husband in the street. Only problem is he's supposed to be in London on business. To give away more would be unfair and the twists are clever and surprising if not always believable. Marriage, trust, love, deceit are all explored here and it builds to a violent finale, that seems out of another book entirely. Since We Fell is full of wonderful minor characters and is deftly written as all Lehane's books are - but this one - despite its brilliant touches - never quite coheres.
The Twelve Lives of Samuel Hawley
Hannah Tinti
(Tinder Press $34.99)
Tinti's second novel is a determinedly literary thriller about a father trying to shake off his criminal past and his daughter's need for answers about her mother's death. Twelve scars on Hawley's body provide a structure and Tinti fashions compelling Herculean tales of them that read like self-sufficient stories in themselves (one was published as such). The coming of age of Hawley's daughter Loo is the least interesting part of the novel, but the action ramps up in the second half as Hawley's ragged past catches up with him.
"The world is a rotten place," Hawley tells Loo, "and you've got to find a way to be rotten if you're going to live in it."
This has a bit of everything - myth, crime, Americana, violence, cosmology, a whale even turns up at a couple of points, but it isn't quite as clever as it thinks it is.
