About ten years ago there was a moderately popular computer game called Sin. It featured a wise talking cop called Blade and his sidekick JC. This book was similar in style and depth which lead me to think it might have started life as a script for a game or a comic. Sadly it lacked the visual flair that makes those mediums compelling.
Ryan Lock is an ex British Military Policeman that now heads up a close protection team for a large American corporate called Meditech. When a protest by animal rights demonstrators becomes the scene for an assassination and then carnage, Lock finds himself in hospital and out of a job. With a young boy also missing and his father an ex employee of Meditech, Lock begins to hunt down the kidnappers and finds himself in a world of hardline animal rights activists and a lot more besides.
Which makes this sound like it could be a lot better than it is. The problems start with writing that is sparse to an extreme and a plot, and characters that are two dimensional at best. As a central character Lock is very flat, not even managing cliché. His partner Ty has slightly more of a presence. Half way through there is a kind of twist that anyone paying moderate attention will not be surprised at. With every mundane story thread I kept waiting for the story to turn around and surprise me. But it just ploughed on. I could go on and on.
What did work? The dialogue will very frequently make you smile, Ty the partner has some appeal and the midpoint change was a welcome relief to a plodding story. There is a section just past the middle where Lock spends some time with Mareta, a Chechen rebel fighter called the ghost. It is by far the best sequence of the book. In fact Mareta is by far the most vivid character in the story. The end sequence does show a little promise.
The shame is that somebody will have invested a great deal of time in writing this book but for me it equated to a disappointing Friday night action movie. The themes are so cliché you might think this was written for young adults, if it was not for the severed heads and bleeding eyes etc. In that context it might appeal to some males under the age of twenty five. Parallels to Lee Child are scandalously short of the mark.
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