Review: "An Honorable Assassin" by Steve Hamilton
An Honorable Assassin by Steve
Hamilton Blackstone,
2024 Steve Hamilton is best known for his series featuring
former Detroit cop turned reluctant Upper Peninsula private eye, Alex
McKnight. McKnight appeared in eleven novels between 1999 and 2018. The
first, A Cold Day in Paradise—which I heartily recommend—netted
Hamilton an Edgar Award for Best First Novel. The McKnight books are meaty,
well-plotted, character-driven extravaganzas, but they never attracted many
readers outside the P.I. genre. Which
is a shame because they are as good as anything the mystery genre has to offer. In 2016, Hamilton changed course and
released a crime thriller, The Second Life of Nick Mason, to great
fanfare. It made multiple best-of-year lists, including from NPR and Kirkus
Reviews and, perhaps most telling, it landed on the New York Times bestseller
list. The Second Life of Nick Mason combined a rich Chicago setting
with solid characterization and an intricate (and surprising) plot. It,
frankly, surpassed most thrillers of its kind on every level. Hamilton
followed it up with the second Nick Mason book, Exit Strategy, in 2017,
then in 2018 released an oddball Alex McKnight book—odd because, unlike the
other McKnight books, it alternates between first and third person and is
told from multiple character perspectives—titled Dead Man Running.
Since then, other than a co-authored novel with Janet Evanovich, Steve
Hamilton has been silent. At least until now, because his third Nick
Mason title, An Honorable Assassin, is scheduled for release tomorrow
(Aug. 27). The Second Life of Nick Mason opened with Mason being
released from a 25-years-to-life sentence, for a truck heist gone wrong,
after serving only five years. Part of the deal is Mason must work as an
assassin for a Chicago gangster named Darius Cole; the guy who arranged for Mason’s
release. Those first two books are about Mason’s struggle to break free from
Cole and now in An Honorable Assassin, after he has finally escaped
Cole, he finds himself bound to a mysterious and sinister international
cartel. An Honorable Assassin begins
only hours after Exit Strategy ends. Mason is sent to the world’s
second largest city, Jakarta, Indonesia, without any instructions except that
he’ll be met at the airport. When he arrives in Jakarta, even before he has
left the airport, Mason’s first assignment is dished out—assassinate a
wealthy terrorist sponsor named Hasham Baya as he arrives on a skyscraper’s
helipad. Everything goes wrong: Baya escapes, the building is overrun by Indonesia’s
paramilitary unit, Detachement-88, and Mason is arrested. The mission planning
seems non-existent to Mason and, even worse, before he can get out of police
custody a French Interpol agent, Martin Sauvage, takes an interest in him. Unlike Hamilton’s first two Nick Mason
novels, which are a marvelous marriage of the crime and the thriller genres, An
Honorable Assassin is a straight-line rocket propelled thriller. It is
closer to Lee Child and David Baldacci than what we are used to seeing from
Hamilton, but the electric style and frenetic pacing keep the pages turning
and the reader from wandering into the improbabilities of the plot. A step
below the first two books in the series, An Honorable Assassin is still
a bunch of fun and very much worth reading. |
Click here to
purchase the Kindle edition or here for the paperback at Amazon. |
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