Wait, did I just read an Amazon First Reads book that I actually enjoyed?

I definitely was not expecting that.

This was an Amazon First Read from back in November 2023, which I just got around to reading this month and I was genuinely surprised at how much I enjoyed this book. Brad Trasker was a fascinating character that embodies both the "almost superhumanly talented" trope of a lot of action/thrillers, but also with a fair amount of the "I'm too old for this shit" trope. As a retired operative returning to the game working for a private employer, there are plenty of scenes in the book where he outsmarts your average antagonist. But there are also a number of scenes where he misses something that someone else notices, and he chastises himself for being too old and out of touch to have noticed something that would not have escaped his attention when he was in his prime. It was a give-and-take relationship that really worked for his character, and it made the ending of the book all the more satisfying when he played all his cards, came up short, and then had to genuinely outsmart the villain using his decades of experience.

If I had one complaint about the book it was that the ultimate antagonist at the very end came a bit out of nowhere. Trasker is hired to run security for a female Elon Musk-type (before he bought Twitter and went crazy) and her next-gen prototype aircraft is blown up in an act of corporate sabotage. And the first 60% of the book is Trasker and his team trying to piece together the tiniest of leads to get to a suspect. They spent another 15% of the book or so uncovering that person... and then the last 25% of the book is basically like, "That guy was just a middle man... this guy is actually the one we're after... no wait, that guy was a middleman too! Now it's totally this other guy!" By the time we work our way (rapidly) up the food chain, the ultimate bad guy is basically a generic "billionaire power broker" type that I wasn't as invested in hating as the middlemen they spent half the book building up to.

Overall, the book had that one significant flaw, but it was otherwise a really great read. Trasker was a fun character and the author did a great job of explaining his thought process so the reader feels like he's walking them through his thought process in this world of corporate espionage. The next book in this series isn't due out until October 2024, but in the meantime I might check out one of his other series. He has one that features a Florida police diver protagonist who specializes in recovering underwater evidence, and another that features a stage magician turned FBI agent. While I'm waiting for the next Trasker book to come out later this year, I'm definitely going to check out at least one more of this guys' titles.

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Created Feb 25, 2024 at 1:16pm • Submit your own review...