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.

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