Unleashed is a gripping vigilante-thriller set in Scotland, by a new author who’s also a practising lawyer. It’s short and violent with no real surprises in the plot, with a tough unstoppable Reacher-type hero. You need to be prepared to suspend disbelief for much of it in terms of characters’ behaviour and what they get away with, but I enjoyed the ride. I received a review copy as part of the Bloodhound review team.
Happily married lawyer Adam Black is out for a run one evening, when he is randomly attacked by Damien Grant, the vicious drug-addled son of a prominent Glaswegian gangster. Black, however, is a former SAS soldier, who uses his lethal skills to defend himself. Cleared by the police, he becomes the target for the Peter Grant’s brutal vengeance, and with nothing left to lose, Black in turn will stop at nothing to wreak his revenge.
We already know from the blurb that something terrible is going to happen to Adam’s family, so I found the first part hard to read while waiting for this to happen. It’s awful but not gratuitous - if that makes sense - and from then on this was a non-stop read for me. There are some fairly gruesome scenes (that’s two books in a row featuring eyeball attacks, ugh), an implausibly high body count, that seems to escape the notice of the police, and later on some nasty torture, but no animal abuse. There is some bad language, if that offends you, but ironically, not nearly enough for convincing Scottish gangster dialogue. Apart from the rather generic American style, I thought it was well enough written, with the right amount of scene setting and character description for this kind of thriller, but limited character development.
I did find it hard to believe that neither Adam nor Peter would foresee the others’ actions nor take more steps to protect themselves from their clearly rather unhinged adversary, but maybe I’ve just read/watched too many of the kind of plots. It’s unclear whether this is the start of a series or a stand alone novel - it ends properly, although Adam inexplicably fails to deal with the senior police officers - one of the other villains responsible for it all, (that’s not really a spoiler) so hopefully that will happen in a sequel sometime - which I’d be happy to read. I’d be happy if the author had the confidence to make his characters more obviously Scottish! Recommended if you like violent fast paced action-revenge stories. Unleashed is published on August 4th.