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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Ho-hum thriller for the Dan Brown generation, 3 Jun 2008
This review is from: The Mark (A Henry Parker Thriller): 1 (MIRA) (Paperback)
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The protagonist is cub reporter who manages to get the police and a wacko hit-man after him. He meets a beautiful girl and, well, you can figure out the rest. The main character is reasonably believable, but the police and the villains that are so two-dimensional that they would blow away in the wind. This is a pretty standard thriller with a plot you've read before, but that doesn't really matter if the tension is ratcheted up (it isn't) and the prose style is good.
As for the prose style, let me quote "As blood leaked from his body, the Ringer put this photo into his right breast pocket. The photo was his final memory of the woman he'd loved so dearly, the only memory left of her. Anne's photo was his second heart, and it beat with the venomous blood of a man whose thirst for vengeance could never be quenched."
Oh dear, even Dan Brown could write better than that. So, this book is recommended if you fancy a brainless thriller to while a way a long train journey, but great literature it ain't.
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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Run Henry run !, 9 Jun 2008
This review is from: The Mark (A Henry Parker Thriller): 1 (MIRA) (Paperback)
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To me, this book as a whole is better than the sum of its parts. It has a creaky plot and off-the-peg (and often bullet-proof) characters (ballsy and resourceful young man, beautiful and blind-trusting sidekick, black-hearted assassin, lots of Sopranos types) but they combine into a fast paced and at time gripping read.
Henry Parker is a new and fiercely ambitious reporter at the New York Gazette. Tired of writing about dead people (he gets the obituaries), he jumps at the chance of an assignment for his journalistic hero, Jack O'Donnell. Sent to interview ex-mobster Luis Guzman for a routine piece on correctional programmes, his instincts get the better of him and he returns for more, correctly suspecting that his man is hiding something. Returning to the apartment he hears Guzman's wife screaming for her life and once he knocks on the door, his life is changed forever.
The story is mainly told in the first person though it does strangely switch to the third from time to time but this does not really affect the story telling. The first person sections often remind me of Ray Liotta as another Henry in the Goodfellas, a film which gets name-checked early in the book. I'm sure this is a coincidence of course...
Three stars overall, it's not a classic but I quite enjoyed it and it would keep you entertained on a long haul flight.
For the record, the black hearted assassin is called Shelton !!
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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
A very good thriller, 14 Oct 2008
This review is from: The Mark (A Henry Parker Thriller): 1 (MIRA) (Paperback)
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This is an extremely good thriller. Admittedly, it doesn't have a particularly large number of twists on the way, but the plot is very nicely paced, in order to keep the pages turning. One has to suspend disbelief to a certain extent, but the storyline never hinges on anything quite so unfathomable as to undermine the premise. With the story based on a fugitive journalist who has been framed for the murder of a policeman, it doesn't exactly test the limits of the genre. Still if you're looking for a decent thriller, this is considerably more polished and readable than some of the tripe that is out there.
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