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After the shattering death of his beloved wife, aging baby-boomer Russell Walker had wanted only to hide from the world in the woods of British Columbia. Instead, an old college acquaintance called Smelly, who was a telepath, had knocked on his door and demanded his help in stopping a serial killer who made Hannibal Lector look like a boy scout. They had managed to convince Nika, a hard-headed and skeptical police officer, and the trio had stopped the killer, though nearly at the cost of their own lives, and things could go back to normal . . . they thought. But then Russell was visited by his estranged son, Jesse, a PR exec from New York, still angry over his father's role in his mother's death. And, to their dismay, Nika and Russell learn that agreeing to help Zudie conceal the fact that he can read minds involves committing to help him hide from the CIA, who have been hunting him desperately ever since he escaped from the MK Ultra Project back in the '60s. Constable Nika must decide what being a peace officer means. Russell must decide on the fly whether or not Smelly is the kind of friend you'd die for. And Jesse, who lives in America, must decide just where his own national--and personal--loyalties lie.… (more)
User reviews
I liked this. But now that I know it's #2, if I had read #1, I probably would have been bored by the recounting of what I now know
Worth a read if you are a fan.
This is the second book in a trilogy but was unaware of this when I got this book. Robinson takes pains to bring the reader up to speed.
And within only a few hundred meters, I slowly became aware that I was swinging along like a walkin’ fool, with a glide in my stride and a cut in my strut, coverin’ ground. The breeze was bracing. I caught myself humming under my breath. How odd. It was as though some sort of weight had been lifted from me….
Once I noticed it, I understood at once what it was. For the first time in what felt like forever…nobody I loved was dying.
For something like six years, I’d had alarm bells going off in my head every minute of every day. Loud ones, insistent ones, urgent ones. “One you love is in mortal danger. You must save them. Or at least avenge them.” Of course, neither was possible. But that didn’t make the alarm bells go silent, not for a minute.
Now the silence in my head was wonderful. There was room in my skull for music again. I was off-duty.
Let's hope that there will also be room in his skull for some more stories.
This book is a continuation of Very Bad Deaths featuring the same cast of characters as that book (Russell, Zandor and Nika) with the addition of Russell's son Jesse. Nika had a cousin look up information about Zandor and that rang alarm bells somewhere. A CIA agent came to Vancouver, found Nika and put a bug on her car which she immediately drove to see Russell on Heron Island where Russell was just enjoying a long overdue visit from Jesse. Jesse noticed the bug and the three of them try to figure out what to do about this mess. Of course, they have to bring the telepath Zandor into the equation. The ending is quite different from the end of Very Hard Choices and it is almost as if Spider was able to foresee the future. It's a little spooky to read in this Trump era.
It is interesting to me that the narrator, Russell, is a widower having lost his beloved wife Susan to cancer. And yet, from all I've read about Jeanne's illness and death it wasn't diagnosed until 2009, well after Very Bad Deaths and at least a year after Very Hard Choices. Maybe Spider is the telepath here?
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DDC/MDS
Fic SF RobinsonS |