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8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
A Tiny Bit of Life Is Injected into This Never-Ending Saga, 14 Dec 2005
Does Without Mercy have character development, unexpected plot twists or fascinating new facts? No.Does Without Mercy continue the unending saga begun with the Rashids? Yes. Does anything happen that isn't in the book's blurb? Yes. It's that last point that saves Without Mercy from being utterly avoidable. Jack Higgins has come up with the beginnings of a new plot to put President Putin at odds with the British and American governments. From that perspective I felt a stir of life in these creaky meanderings through endless shootings with ex-IRA thugs, visits with creepy foreign characters and "dead" villains turning out to be alive. To liven up the plot, Mr. Higgins takes us to a new locale, Algeria, and disposes of one of his long-time characters, Detective Superintendent Hannah Bernstein, about whom he began to have trouble writing plausible roles about three books ago. The other new element is a continual reference to Russians drinking vodka and champagne. I'm sure you'll be shocked by this insight. Stick with Mr. Higgins for one more book. Perhaps he will write us a new story in this series at some point and remember to make Sean Dillon a character rather than a mere killing machine with regrets.
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8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
More predictable than a snow storm in Siberia, 29 Nov 2005
By A Customer
I vowed after the last Dark Justice, never to read another Higgins/Dillon novel again; unfortunately I was given Without Mercy as a present.
Whereas I thought that previous Dillon novels couldn't get any more formulaic/predictable/dull, I was wrong, because now we have a Dillon novel, where the actual hero does less than his sidekicks.
The action (and I do use the term in it's loosest possible form) seems to be based solely on characters jumping on planes, drinking copious quantities of alcohol, and "bumping" into wholly unbelievable characters in wholly unbelievable locations.
Sound familiar? well it is, with the added bonus that our man Dillon does nothing more than rack up the air miles. To be honest, this storyline could have run without him, such is his total lack of bearing on the sequence of events.
The dialogue is it's usual victorian mishmash (just who on earth says "Damn you" these days?) and as with previous Higgins/Dillon novels, about the only suspense was generated, waiting for someone to say "Gadzooks" or "Have at you, you cad" (you get my drift)
This novel is best borrowed from the library
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14 of 17 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
A tentative return to form?, 18 Oct 2005
This new Sean Dillon novel is generally a better effort than its formulaic predecessors. It starts off immediately after the end of Higgins last novel, "Dark Justice", and again features the ongoing adventures of General Charles Ferguson and his team of secret agent enforcers, led by the ex-IRA bomber Sean Dillon.One of the core team dies early on in the novel (I won't say who, although the dust-jacket gives it away) and the plot is basically how Dillon and co. take their revenge on the killers while foiling a ghastly plot by a foreign power to take over large oil interests. It has the all routine plotting situations of a Dillon thriller: stand-offs in the Dorchester Hotel's bar, clandestine meetings in Wapping pubs, shoot-outs with IRA hitmen in remote Ulster villages, lots of champagne drinking, and the usual attempts by the baddies to kill off the wheelchair-bound Sergeant Roper. So far, so formulaic, and the author clearly sees no need to deviate from what he thinks readers expect from a Dillon novel. But this novel is just more exciting and faster-moving than Higgins' more recent efforts. It reads as if Higgins is making a concerted effort to give his readers value for money and reply to criticism that his past few books have been boring and too routine. The pacing is quick and gripping. There are even some attempts at characterisation in how Higgins deals with Dillon's grief at the death of his comrade, and the development of Salter Junior into a fully-fledged member of Ferguson's unit. The neo-KGB enemies of the previous novel return for a second outing, this time ably assisted by a Very Famous Russian Premier and by two new characters who no doubt will feature heavily in next year's novel (and probably take at least 3 further books to be killed off). While the outcome, as always, is never really in doubt, Higgins has produced a novel that is full of action and with enough twists to keep you reading. If, ultimately, his Dillon novels are now just too identikit to stand comparison with Higgins' best work, "Without Mercy" shows that there is still some life left in the old dog.
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