Friday, February 19, 2016

Book Review: THE ASSASSIN'S BETRAYAL by Mark Allen

I've known Mark Allen for a while now as a fellow author, blogger, and all-round action-adventure novel enthusiast. We've been corresponding back and forth for years, and we talked a lot about his planning of the sequel / not-sequel to his first full-length novel, THE ASSASSIN'S PRAYER, which came out a couple of years ago, and did pretty darn well. Mark liked how some things turned out, but in retrospect wished he'd done other things a little differently.

The result of all that experience and contemplation is THE ASSASSIN'S BETRAYAL, and I have to say, the wait was worth it. This story has everything that Mark pulled off to perfection in his first novel, and polished smooth any rough spots the first book might have had. There's action, there's sex, there's gunfights and swordplay, knives and chainsaws, welcoming dive bars and swimming pools filled with hungry sharks. In short, everything you need to tell an awesome, over-the-top-but-not-too-far action story, and make it a real page-turner.

And I say that last out of experience, because I downloaded the Kindle edition of the book late one night and read the first few pages before bed. Then next night, I picked up where I'd left off, and was so engrossed and caught up in the book's rapid-fire pacing, I stayed up well past one o'clock in the morning because I literally couldn't make myself put the book down and go to sleep - I knew I'd just lie there awake, wondering what was going to happen next.

So, if you're into the modern action-thriller genre, dig assassins and gunplay and a book with a significant body count, you cannot go wrong with THE ASSASSIN'S BETRAYAL. Pick it up!

5 comments:

Matthew said...

That sounds pretty interesting. The concept reminds me of Barry Eisler's John Rain books or maybe the manga Golgo 13.

Jack Badelaire said...

I'd say TAP and TAB are more a throwback to the '80s than the Rain books, but yeah, it deals a lot with the shadow world of assassins, hit men, organized crime...almost all the characters are involved in that in some way, or their unwitting civilians caught up in the crossfire.

Unknown said...

Jack is right, in that I designed both "The Assassin's Prayer" and "The Assassin's Betrayal" to have a strong '80s flavor. I also wanted them to have a bit more emotion/drama/plot than the standard-issue men's action-adventure books from that era (whether or not I succeeded in that is up to the reader to decide). So you get all the "guns 'n' guts" of the genre, but hopefully with a touch more emotional conflict.

Matthew said...

That sounds even more interesting.

Charles Gramlich said...

Sounds like it has more of what I read fiction for! :)