What do you think?
Rate this book
Devil's Breath
What if you learned a secret so deadly it could destroy the world?
Ian MacRae is a security specialist dedicated to saving lives in the most dangerous trouble spots in the world - places like Iraq, Afghanistan, and Somalia. He's always left the horrors of the job behind when the work is done...but this time they've followed him home.
After a routine meeting in Baghdad apartment, MacRae returns home to Tasmania to find his world shattered by a series of brutal attacks, pushing his security skills to the limit as he struggles to keep his friends alive in the face of attacks by the shadowy terrorist group Al-Islam Jaysh. Their target? A secret, forged in the worlds biggest nuclear accident in Chernobyl in 1986. A secret so deadly that it could spell the end of the human race.
Now MacRae must join forces with Eshe, a shadowy Egyptian spy, in a journey that takes them from the wealth and corruption of Wall Street to the radioactive wastelands of Pripyat in Ukraine, entangling them in passion and betrayal before a final devastating confrontation where MacRae is forced to choose life or death for those he loves the most.
Read Devil's Breath - a breathtaking thriller by breakout indie sensation Jon P. Wells today.
Ian MacRae is a security specialist dedicated to saving lives in the most dangerous trouble spots in the world - places like Iraq, Afghanistan, and Somalia. He's always left the horrors of the job behind when the work is done...but this time they've followed him home.
After a routine meeting in Baghdad apartment, MacRae returns home to Tasmania to find his world shattered by a series of brutal attacks, pushing his security skills to the limit as he struggles to keep his friends alive in the face of attacks by the shadowy terrorist group Al-Islam Jaysh. Their target? A secret, forged in the worlds biggest nuclear accident in Chernobyl in 1986. A secret so deadly that it could spell the end of the human race.
Now MacRae must join forces with Eshe, a shadowy Egyptian spy, in a journey that takes them from the wealth and corruption of Wall Street to the radioactive wastelands of Pripyat in Ukraine, entangling them in passion and betrayal before a final devastating confrontation where MacRae is forced to choose life or death for those he loves the most.
Read Devil's Breath - a breathtaking thriller by breakout indie sensation Jon P. Wells today.
362 pages, Kindle Edition
Published October 27, 2018
37 people want to read
About the author
Jon P. Wells
2 books4 followersI started writing novels a few years ago when I realised that the truth is often stranger than fiction, and there's a story to be found everywhere you go and in everyone you meet.
My aim as an author is to take my readers on adventures far from their day to day lives, and into a world of excitement and danger where maybe they'll ask the question...what would I do in this situation?
I live in a quiet beach town on the island of Tasmania, a place of beauty and mystery, where just about anything can and does happen, and I'll keep writing as long as the stories keep coming to me.
My aim as an author is to take my readers on adventures far from their day to day lives, and into a world of excitement and danger where maybe they'll ask the question...what would I do in this situation?
I live in a quiet beach town on the island of Tasmania, a place of beauty and mystery, where just about anything can and does happen, and I'll keep writing as long as the stories keep coming to me.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
May 30, 2016
Private security consultant Ian MacRae agrees to do a favour for a friend, meeting a low-level informant in Baghdad, a meeting that propels him into a complex and terrifying search for the truth of what happened at Chernobyl in 1986...and a frantic race to stop world annihilation.
Devil's Breath is an enjoyable thriller, the pace rapid and the writing competent and well-tailored to the genre. Author Jon P. Wells brings together the thirty years' past events at Chernobyl and modern-day headlines, weaving them together to create a plausible story. Like many of its genre, the plot is a bit dependent on some coincidences and connections, but no more so than most thrillers, and there are sufficient twists and turns to keep the reader guessing.
The main character is attractive: the protagonist, Ian MacRae, specializes in security analysis for non-governmental organizations working in remote and dangerous areas. Other characters are a bit two-dimensional, but again, in a way typical for the genre. An occasional minor inaccuracy in facts - Dreamliners have two engines, not four, as one example - could detract from the verisimilitude for some readers. Devil's Breath is easily as good as many thrillers available as airport paperbacks, and certainly better than some, and would translate well onto the screen. Four stars.
Review by Goodreads Author Marian Thorpe: Empire's Daughter and Spinnings: Brief Fantasies in Prose and Verse
The author provided me with a copy of the book in exchange for an honest review.
Devil's Breath is an enjoyable thriller, the pace rapid and the writing competent and well-tailored to the genre. Author Jon P. Wells brings together the thirty years' past events at Chernobyl and modern-day headlines, weaving them together to create a plausible story. Like many of its genre, the plot is a bit dependent on some coincidences and connections, but no more so than most thrillers, and there are sufficient twists and turns to keep the reader guessing.
The main character is attractive: the protagonist, Ian MacRae, specializes in security analysis for non-governmental organizations working in remote and dangerous areas. Other characters are a bit two-dimensional, but again, in a way typical for the genre. An occasional minor inaccuracy in facts - Dreamliners have two engines, not four, as one example - could detract from the verisimilitude for some readers. Devil's Breath is easily as good as many thrillers available as airport paperbacks, and certainly better than some, and would translate well onto the screen. Four stars.
Review by Goodreads Author Marian Thorpe: Empire's Daughter and Spinnings: Brief Fantasies in Prose and Verse
The author provided me with a copy of the book in exchange for an honest review.
August 12, 2018
I was totally keen to read this novel because I live in Tasmania, the home base of the main character. It's such a small and unassuming place that I was intrigued as much by the setting as by whatever connection there might be with Chernobyl - the blurb on the back cover had me hooked from the outset.
I was immediately drawn in by the set-up: Settings, characters, events... and impressed by Wells'use of language. The work is well edited, easy to read, with a liberal sprinkling of clever or beautiful gem phrases which caused me to pause just long enough to appreciate them, but not so long as to distract from the flow of the story. I liked that a lot.
It was great to read a novel that features my home environment, but the flipside of that is that I soon realised that perhaps I was not an intended reader. First was my disappointment a few Chapter 6 paragraphs about the joy of speeding on our local public roads. Speed mentality has long been a sensitive cultural problem for locals, and the dissonance sucked me right out of the story. More importantly for the story itself, it gave MacRae an element of bogan irresponsibility. Not Cool. MacRae's character is alert and attuned to risk, and apparently respectful of life, so the attribute is not befitting. The moment is very well-written, but it's not relevant to this particular story, so it would be better left out, without affecting how the scene unfolds. I was again sucked out of the story by Langworth having a 9mm automatic pistol on page 297: Nope. This book was published long after Australia's now-famous gun control regulation was enacted following a significant Tasmanian incident, and every informed reader would want to know how any character would come to possess it here. A short explanation, or a change of weapon, would overcome this problem. All that said, presumably the target audience is American rather than Tasmanian/Australian, and at the time of publication Americans would probably not have noticed anything unusual.
[To be perfectly transparent, I agonised for a while over whether to include the above paragraph in my review because I also have plans to write for an American audience because that's where my genre is popular. Therefore I appreciate the huge challenge of balancing the expectations of the audience, conventions of the genre and the norms of the settings. It's not easy! So, overall, I think Wells did an amazing job of achieving that balance given this local only had two little things to whinge about.]
The rest of the story is interesting, with plenty of twists and turns, and enough clues to keep me wondering if I'd figured it out (which I had not). I especially like that Wells kept me a little distrustful, wondering if a character or two would double-cross MacRae. That is perhaps my favorite thing about the weaving of this story.
I found the plot very interesting, and I was impressed that Wells appeared to have included just the right amount of research to give plausible descriptions of places and events, and the writing itself was comfortable to read. I was more than happy for his words to be my eyes and ears on this journey, and would happily read more of his work.
In terms of plot criticisms, I had one moment of confusion about how the detonation logistics could be changed when the chief scientist read the final details hours after the countdown had begun. Perhaps it's just that I missed it or didn't understand it. To be fair though, the main focus is on MacRae's efforts to solve the problem, and the book is not a how-to instruction manual for weapons of mass destruction.
I am glad to have found this book, and so glad to have found a fellow-Tasmanian writer whose word-weaving is so fluid. As a first novel, this book is awesome. I am very keen to read his next!
I was immediately drawn in by the set-up: Settings, characters, events... and impressed by Wells'use of language. The work is well edited, easy to read, with a liberal sprinkling of clever or beautiful gem phrases which caused me to pause just long enough to appreciate them, but not so long as to distract from the flow of the story. I liked that a lot.
It was great to read a novel that features my home environment, but the flipside of that is that I soon realised that perhaps I was not an intended reader. First was my disappointment a few Chapter 6 paragraphs about the joy of speeding on our local public roads. Speed mentality has long been a sensitive cultural problem for locals, and the dissonance sucked me right out of the story. More importantly for the story itself, it gave MacRae an element of bogan irresponsibility. Not Cool. MacRae's character is alert and attuned to risk, and apparently respectful of life, so the attribute is not befitting. The moment is very well-written, but it's not relevant to this particular story, so it would be better left out, without affecting how the scene unfolds. I was again sucked out of the story by Langworth having a 9mm automatic pistol on page 297: Nope. This book was published long after Australia's now-famous gun control regulation was enacted following a significant Tasmanian incident, and every informed reader would want to know how any character would come to possess it here. A short explanation, or a change of weapon, would overcome this problem. All that said, presumably the target audience is American rather than Tasmanian/Australian, and at the time of publication Americans would probably not have noticed anything unusual.
[To be perfectly transparent, I agonised for a while over whether to include the above paragraph in my review because I also have plans to write for an American audience because that's where my genre is popular. Therefore I appreciate the huge challenge of balancing the expectations of the audience, conventions of the genre and the norms of the settings. It's not easy! So, overall, I think Wells did an amazing job of achieving that balance given this local only had two little things to whinge about.]
The rest of the story is interesting, with plenty of twists and turns, and enough clues to keep me wondering if I'd figured it out (which I had not). I especially like that Wells kept me a little distrustful, wondering if a character or two would double-cross MacRae. That is perhaps my favorite thing about the weaving of this story.
I found the plot very interesting, and I was impressed that Wells appeared to have included just the right amount of research to give plausible descriptions of places and events, and the writing itself was comfortable to read. I was more than happy for his words to be my eyes and ears on this journey, and would happily read more of his work.
In terms of plot criticisms, I had one moment of confusion about how the detonation logistics could be changed when the chief scientist read the final details hours after the countdown had begun. Perhaps it's just that I missed it or didn't understand it. To be fair though, the main focus is on MacRae's efforts to solve the problem, and the book is not a how-to instruction manual for weapons of mass destruction.
I am glad to have found this book, and so glad to have found a fellow-Tasmanian writer whose word-weaving is so fluid. As a first novel, this book is awesome. I am very keen to read his next!
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews