Silence

I'm a huge Thomas Perry fan and love everything he writes but I really really really loved this one. Great characters. Great plot. Fun and fascinating.

Silence is Thomas Perry’s 15th book: his smooth easy style is a pleasure to read and his characters, while unremarkable, are well-observed and developed. PI Jack Till shows Wendy Hill how to disappear when she comes to him, fearing for her life.

When Wendy’s former partner is arrested for murder six years later, Jack is the only man who can track her down, and prove him innocent. As he searches, he is followed by a pair of assassins, who are trying to kill her and are using Jack to flush her out.

In the best American tradition, good is rewarded, lovers reunited and evil punished: there are few surprises, but Perry produces his usual solid and well-crafted read.

This was a good, very solid cat-and-mouse-chase based suspense novel from a very reliable author. There are some really quite intersting meditations on relationships and the nature of love and marriage--considerably more philosophical than one typically expects (or needs) in popular fiction. There was one major problem with what I think of as "continuity," the keeping straight of the details of the story and plotlines. The author has what have to be concurrent events involving different sets of characters actually happening on different days. It's minor, but it bugs me when authors and editors can't keep their stories straight. There were also at least a half dozen typos or other proofing errors that were missed in the editing process.

I didn't think that it was his best book.but it was still enjoyable. Some of the characters need more depth and more information about who they were and why they did some of the things they did. For example: Are there really husbands that make bargains to go off to the other side of the country with paid female surrogates? Do said surrogates hang around for years waiting in case they get a chance to go off with the husband...who actually brings the kids with him??? I also would have liked to have known why the bad guys were so eager to kill Wendy although there were times that I would have happily killed her for them. Not a bad book but not as good as "The Butcher Boy.}

Silence was an enjoyable thriller, with a few annoyances in the female characters.Thomas Perry is known for writing stories about someone leading people into hiding and into new lives in his Jane Whitefield books. Silence has an interesting twist-- Jack Till coached Wendy Harper in the skills she would need to successfully disappear 6 years ago. Now, he needs to find her, and must unravel the steps she took.The book switches between views of Jack (& Wendy) and that of Sylvie (& Paul) Turner, the ballroom dancing killers for hire, with occasional looks at other characters. For the most part, the characters were interesting and well written, but I had an issue with each of the two primary female characters.Sylvie married a killer for show more hire, and became his partner in his business as well. In the middle of a job (which isn't going well), she keeps worrying about why he doesn't show her more affection, does he still love her, is she losing her beauty as she's aging, and so on. This was distracting and unnecessary.Wendy's actions are shaped by her falling in love with Jack during their short acquaintance, when he was teaching her how to escape the person trying to kill her. In spite of this, she marries a man with children, putting them all in danger. I wanted to think she was a different sort of person.There was a twist at the end I didn't see coming, that answered the minor problems I had with the plot up until that point. The book kept me listening, and that's the biggest test. show less

Yuck! I picked this book because of the endorsement by Stephen King. Either he has terrible taste in books, or he got paid a good chunk of change to lend his name. It took forever to get through and never really came together in the end.

Excellent standalone novel on a woman forced to disappear from a man who wants to kill her and the efforts to find her.