Patriot Acts (2007)

Would have enjoyed it more if I had read preceding books in series I think. ( )

Starting where the last left off.

Atticus is lured away into an ambush and the rest of them are assaulted at the same time, leading to several casualties, including Kodiak's partner, Natalie.

This leads to a revenge long game as the survivors want to find out who was behind it - the person smelling very much like a US government official.

http://freesf.strandedinoz.com/wordpress/2012/02/patriot-acts-greg-rucka/ ( )

Rucka finally hits the target straight-on with an exceptional thriller that goes a long way towards marking Rucka's maturing sense of creating a story that is engrossing, challenging and satisfying. This book must be read after reading "Critical Space," which, in turn, should be read after "Smoker." The central character of Atticus Kodiak is given honest, thoughtful, reasonable development. The supporting characters are drawn more realistically. Where the story development in "Keeper" (the first book of the series) is minimal, consisting of jumps from one action scene to another, "Patriot Acts" is a fairly well developed story.

It is a pleasure to have seen Greg Rucka develop as a writer. ( )

Years ago I recall enjoying earlier novels in the series. The main character, Atticus Kodiak was an ex-military man turned bodyguard. I vaguely recall the story where he is assigned to protect a man being hunted by an assassin called Drama. Now Atticus and Drama are lovers and entangled in some plot involving the killing of an FBI agent; a friend. They are on the run, but also trying to find out who set them up and why. Pretty standard stuff and definitely not as well done as I recall. I also recall Atticus as a man who wouldn’t befriend a person like Drama (read cold-blooded assassin with so much blood on her hands as to completely erase her humanity) and so how they wind up together is a mystery. Maybe it’s contained in another book, but I think some explanation would be helpful in this one since I missed it.

Maybe the writer was bad all along and I didn’t notice. Maybe his skills have declined and these books are worse than the ones I read. Maybe he is so involved in other projects that he doesn’t care about this series anymore and has let the quality suffer. Whatever it is, I think I’m done with this series. I had some interest in reviving it in my reading life, but this one killed that desire.

Partly it’s the clunky sentence structure. He often uses the same word or variations of the same word in a single sentence or in two sentences close together. Once in a while isn’t so bad, but repeated often enough it sticks out. Also, he has a terrible tendency to lecture. That is to include lengthy asides to explain various techniques, devices and operational details that completely take the reader out of the story. Once he spent pages and pages describing how an assassin sets up his or her legitimate face to the world through a shady lawyer. All well and good, but it was directly following Drama’s rescue of Atticus in a tense and dramatic scene. As a reader I was all jazzed up and wanted to hear what came next; how they got away from the scene, how Atticus was surviving his beating, where they went, etc. But all I got was a lecture about how to hide your blood money and sound out a lawyer to tell how far to the dark side he’ll go. Serious mistake. The timing was disastrous even if the information was interesting; which it wasn’t terribly. If it were me, if I decided I really needed to include such information, I’d have done it in smaller chunks during parts of the story that already dealt with set-up or take down, not during one of my more intense scenes. I don’t think the author understands pacing or narrative flow since he committed this crime more than once. Oy vey.

Character-wise, I didn’t perceive any chemistry between Atticus and Drama. It was as if they were actors just pretending to have an intimate relationship. It seemed forced and hesitant to me. No inside jokes. No fond memories. No pillow talk. Just how did these two bond, anyway? No clue. Another character is killed at the beginning; a close, long-time friend of Atticus’s and the revenge plot just seemed like going through the motions. Maybe because of the 3 ½ year gap between the death and the revenge, but it rang hollow. ( )