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One More Kill
He was a trained killer, an orphaned kid who rose from raw recruit to the rank of major in the US Army Rangers. He was looking forward to retiring at the end of a thirty-year hitch, but when he developed a low-grade form of leukemia, the Army pushed him out and left him feeling alone and useless – until a fluke encounter with a rogue doctor tipped him into a new hobby: killing those who had done great harm and gotten away with it.
But then a police detective starts to dig into his “operations,” while a vicious old enemy resurfaces with a scheme to draw the Ranger into a web of contract killing and gun running. Pushed too far, the Ranger means to solve his problems with bombs, bullets, and his own bare hands.
But then a police detective starts to dig into his “operations,” while a vicious old enemy resurfaces with a scheme to draw the Ranger into a web of contract killing and gun running. Pushed too far, the Ranger means to solve his problems with bombs, bullets, and his own bare hands.
343 pages, Hardcover
Published January 1, 2018
3 people want to read
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Displaying 1 of 1 review
October 10, 2019
I'm deeply not a fan of thrillers, but I gave this one a try because I'm very fond of Hughes' short fiction.
This book is engrossing and moves at a fast clip; it definitely worked for me as a fast-paced page-turner.
The problem is, I'm a very critical reader (to my detriment...), and there's a lot of things here (and in the thriller genre in general) that frustrated me, or just worked poorly.
The book takes quite a while to build up steam. Not because things aren't happening, but because each of them feels open-and-shut. Like we're reading a lot of standalone outings before actually getting into a novel-length story.
The protagonist is constructed very conveniently to be just the right type of psychopath -- the kind who's actually really caring towards "good" people; whose only symptoms are his ability and willingness to kill effectively; who's engineered to be sympathetic while doing horrible things. Dexter worked hard on character and pulled this off really well; this book doesn't have anywhere near that scope or character work, so the author fiat shows much more, and I just didn't feel the protagonist gave me anything to relate to at all, besides being a kind of revenge-fantasy insert.
All that being said, the set-up is interesting; revenge-fantasies certainly have their compelling side; and once the story gets all its balls up in the air, this was a lot of fun.
This book is engrossing and moves at a fast clip; it definitely worked for me as a fast-paced page-turner.
The problem is, I'm a very critical reader (to my detriment...), and there's a lot of things here (and in the thriller genre in general) that frustrated me, or just worked poorly.
The book takes quite a while to build up steam. Not because things aren't happening, but because each of them feels open-and-shut. Like we're reading a lot of standalone outings before actually getting into a novel-length story.
The protagonist is constructed very conveniently to be just the right type of psychopath -- the kind who's actually really caring towards "good" people; whose only symptoms are his ability and willingness to kill effectively; who's engineered to be sympathetic while doing horrible things. Dexter worked hard on character and pulled this off really well; this book doesn't have anywhere near that scope or character work, so the author fiat shows much more, and I just didn't feel the protagonist gave me anything to relate to at all, besides being a kind of revenge-fantasy insert.
All that being said, the set-up is interesting; revenge-fantasies certainly have their compelling side; and once the story gets all its balls up in the air, this was a lot of fun.
Displaying 1 of 1 review