3 out of 4 stars
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The Last Assassination is a political action thriller by James E. Doucette. The assassin in question is actually two brothers, highly paid assassins who were born in Kurdistan and trained by the Israeli Mossad as deniable killers for hire.
Eventually, the brothers weary of living double lives; vengeance for their lost families has been achieved many times over, and they begin to think of settling down. Offered a high-paying job, they agree, this will be their last assassination.
A drone strike in Syria goes horribly wrong and an Iranian politician is murdered in Austria. Mark Plotnick, former Israeli Mossad agent and now lobbyist in Washington, D.C., knows they are somehow connected but can’t quite put the pieces together. Personally committed to finding answers because his son is the drone pilot about to be scapegoated by the higher-ups, he turns to an old friend in Israel to get to the bottom of the mystery. With allies and enemies both within the American government and around the world, Plotnick must use all his skills and ingenuity to solve the puzzle without further loss of life.
The plot of this book is brilliantly written and executed, with lots of twists and turns along the way. There were a couple of major surprises I really didn’t see coming, including one massive shock close to the end which flipped a lot of what I thought I knew on its head.
While I enjoyed the plot, I had some issues with the characterization and the pacing. The point of view flipped multiple times between characters, and there was never really one primary protagonist (or antagonist) for the reader to become invested with. A female character was introduced part-way into the book and seemed to suddenly become the most important character in it. And while the shock twist near the end was absolutely brilliant, I thought the ending itself was weak, with a number of loose ends not being addressed and leaving me with questions I felt the author should have addressed. I also found the anti-Arab bias evident in the author’s writing - not one single Arab character was portrayed as other than venal at best, villainous at worst - off-putting.
I found a few spelling and grammar errors in the book which a competent proofreader should have picked up, but I would suggest a round of content editing first to tidy up the pacing issues and tighten up the characterization. Fans of political thrillers such as those by Tom Clancy or Ben Coes will probably enjoy this one, but I’m afraid it had too many issues for me to award it more than three out of four stars.
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The last Assassination
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