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Solid storytelling, captivating characters, and a pulsating pace make this contemporary potboiler a fun and fulfilling ride. The plot is intricate, the prose is precise, and the dialogue often dances with an Irish lilt. For devotees of slam-bang action mixed with enough detail to keep everything relatively credible, this is a doozy of a tale that will keep readers racing from chapter to chapter.
New Orleans is the major setting in the days immediately following Hurricane Katrina. Chaos and calamity prevail as looters, the law, and good and bad luck collide when things start to get really fractious in the French Quarter. Before you know it, bodies are piling up on the street—almost as many from homicide as from hurricane winds. One of those providing the corpses is O'Grady, an ex-deputy district attorney, ex-Vietnam vet, and ex-Irish Republican Army recruit who has to eliminate thugs, assassins, and more with extreme prejudice just to stay alive and do the same for his friends. One of these friends, the Kid, is a man fated to have seen what really happened that fateful day in Dallas when JFK was assassinated, a truth that some people definitely want to keep under wraps.
Author Mahn is a writer as comfortable with wit and irony as he is with derring-do and danger. And he's particularly affluent with the latter. His action sequences strike with cinematic impact. Never far behind is his penchant for humor that keeps things light among the lurid goings-on. Mahn is a weaver of words skilled at bawdiness without bowing to burlesque. For readers with time to kill, a grand time will undoubtedly be had between the pages of this book.
RECOMMENDED by the US Review