2 out of 4 stars
Share This Review
The Last Assassination by James E. Doucette uses the accidental bombing by an American drone aircraft of a Syrian hospital in the Syrian Civil War as the focal point. Two Kurdish mercenary assassins, Henri and Philip Bourdeau, originally trained by Mossad, who work under one name - The Dagger. They have grown tired of their mercenary work.
The cast of main characters includes another Mossad trained operative, Mark Plotnik, a high powered lawyer and lobbyist with dual citizenship, Israel and United States America. Mark seeks to solve the puzzle of how the drone attack by American forces could have gone so wrong and hit a Doctors Without Borders hospital in Syria. His interest stems from his son’s role as pilot of the drone who stands to take the blame for higher officers’ mistakes.
The book moves around the world including incidents in Saudi Arabia, Syria, Israel, Russia, England, Finland, and Austria. The Last Assassination fills in the backgrounds of the main characters well. These main characters act when necessary with almost flawless perfection in carrying out their murders and related activities. They act in an amoral universe where means often justifies ends when battling enemies trying to weaken and attack the U.S. and Israel. In the meantime, bureaucrats and politicians perform their careful algebra of buck-passing and blame-placing while avoiding confronting the real enemies. Every mission gets accomplished quickly without human or mechanical error. Enemies are dispatched with cold-blooded efficiency.
The writing style is crisp and precise. Characters speak much like the narrative with no real differentiation among the characters. Dialogue often consists of direct statements that advance the narrative but rarely include humor or figurative language, except for the nom de guerre of the assassins. That said, the writer rarely makes a grammatical mistake like the faulty parallelism of “The Iraqis, Russians, and Iran,” or a fragment like “Another two hours sitting in a boxcar in the Nevada desert, pretending to be a pilot.” Perhaps the grammatical control comes from the tightly constructed sentences that rarely extend beyond two clauses.
If you like lots of action in current hotspots with occasional looks at the scenery, this book will fill that bill. If you desire a thriller that explores the minds and motivations of these characters, you need to find another book. Since I prefer a deeper insight into human thinking and more suspense than every mission executed without problems, I rate this book 2 out of 4 stars. It is a relatively short novel, the book moves along well and can be read with ease. The foreign settings add flavor. In other words, it provides some safe escapism.
******
The last Assassination
View: on Bookshelves | on Amazon
Like jgraney8's review? Post a comment saying so!
