Lots of Action in a Good Guys against
the Bad Storyline
Blackout is an
action thriller, with the good guys (Archer and his teammates) against the bad. And for that simple storyline, it has all the
right parts. The pacing is fast. You hardly have time to relax from one attack
to the next. The action scenes are
intense, explicit, and sometimes grisly (be forewarned). The tension is good, with a foe that appears
invincible. And all of those parts are
well done. But if you’re looking for
more – say character development beyond the minimal or even a bit of a romantic
backstory? Well, you need to look
elsewhere.
Blackout
builds suspense by methodically revealing first, what’s happening, then who’s
involved, and finally, why. In fact, the
why continues to almost the end of the book…which is possible because there are
ten targets and seven killers, not including Archer’s organization, the Armed
Response Unit (ARU). We end up with a
lot of stories about upbringing, battles, and family, but these generally serve
to reinforce a stereotype. Even Archer,
who seems to lament his time away from a woman he likes, puts himself squarely
in the macho, save-the-world mold when he thinks, “To be with her, he would
have to leave the Armed Response Unit. And right now that wasn't something he
was prepared to do.”
The tension in Blackout
is stoked by the fact that the good guys are less experienced, less well armed,
and less ruthless than their foe. That
stumped me at first, as a job with “one of the two premier counter-terrorist squads” in London would seem to attract ex-special forces
personnel. But for some reason, the men
of the ARU came up through the police ranks, a fact that becomes clear later in
the book. Yeah, you’re not going to stop
a terrorist by reading him his rights.
Although I’ve said the storyline is simple, the good guys are
wearing gray hats, not white, as you will find.
More could have been made of that issue, but then, it probably would
have come at the expense of the action.
And action is this book’s forte.
I can’t fault the author for his decision.
There were only a few places where I ended up scratching my
head. For one, the bad guys’ safe house
was a recently completed office building.
It had such poor security that they seemed to come and go at will over
several days, even wiring it for self-destruction in advance. Or in another case, one of the targets
decided to hide in an unknown location…after telling everyone else in the
office where they would be. That seemed
to go well beyond naivete.
But these concerns were small
and overall, the tension and pace of this action thriller are hard to
beat. Just don’t look for too much
beyond the good guys against the bad.
