Finished 7-10-10, rating 4/5, thriller, pub. 2010

Book #20 in the Lucas Davenport Prey series

Lucas and the gang are all back and ready to find the bad guys.  Weather is involved in a very high profile operation to separate conjoined twins and she unwittingly sees the inside guy of the pharmacy hold up at the hospital.  When one of the four men kills the pharmacist mere robbery turns to murder and the police are even more motivated to find the culprit.  The bikers who were responsible decide to bring in a hired gun to take out each other but they also decide that Weather must go too and this brings Lucas front and center.  Lucas trusts his friends Virgil Flowers, Jenkins, and Shrake to protect Weather and he is free to do what he does best, track down killers.

I’ve read every book of the series and the past few have only been okay for me, so I was happy to find myself completely engaged with Lucas again.  Maybe it was because this was as much about Weather as Lucas and the contrast worked.  And the bad guys were really bad.  The inside guy at the hospital was a real piece of work, even more so than the scary hired gun, Cappy. 

There was no mystery, only a compulsion to turn the pages to see how it would all play out, not only with the bad guys, but with the conjoined twins too.  The separation operation took up a lot of the storyline and it wa a nice change of pace.  Lucas and Weather seem to have a healthy home life with teen Letty and baby Sam, although they seem to have little interaction with the kids.  So, the one thing that struck me as odd was when Weather said she wanted another baby.  She never held the baby, even when she was housebound and under police protection fearing for her life.  But other than that this was a spot on thriller.

Another great addition to the series.

I checked this book out of the library.

Finished 7-3-10, rating 4/5, thriller, pub. 2010

“the establishment is bigger now, more entrenched.  The Roosevelt and Truman expansions were ratified by Eisenhower.  Kennedy’s and Johnson’s abuses were ratified by Nixon.  Bush Jr.’s extraconstitutional moves have all been ratified by Obama.  It’s a ratchet effect.  There hasn’t been a federal law in the last sixty years that’s done other than increase the government’s power and influence, and the power and influence of the corporations that manage the government by extension.  The leviathan only grows.”

Chapter 41

Black ops soldier Ben Treven is back in this political stand-alone thriller and the clock is ticking on his job of recovering 92 tapes of extreme torture that have been stolen.  If they are released to the public heads will roll and the people will rise up in horror.  Treven knows how to intimidate and kill without remorse and that is what makes him so good at his job, but the man with the tapes is even more impressive than Ben since he is the one who is performing these acts of unspeakable torture.  The CIA, FBI and other clandestine government groups all want the tapes for different reasons and in Ben’s pursuit, he becomes tied to a sexy FBI agent.

I read the first book with Treven, Fault Line, and liked this one better.  I was intrigued by the story of the tapes (Abu Graib anyone?) and how relevant the story is in today’s political climate.  It is timely, scary, and left me with disappointment in the government.  And I’m not choosing sides either, all politicians deserve my disgust at times. 

It moves fast and there is much to appreciate if you are a political junkie, like me.  The author spent three years in a covert position with the CIA, so he knows a thing or two about how things work.  The one thing I did dislike in the book was the one sex scene, which I found to be a little too much for me.  And I’m not opposed to sex scenes, but this one was too violent for my tastes.  But overall I liked the book a lot and it led to a great discussion with my husband on the Fourth of July.  The end also left an opening for the next Ben Treven book and I am hoping there will be one.

This book was sent to me by the author.