Bleeding Hearts

Part road story, part thriller, part redemptive romance with guns (LOTS of guns), this is fun without being entirely essential reading. Enjoyable and interesting characters including a coke sniffing slob of an ex-NY cop private eye and the ultimate in anti-heroes: how amazing to be made to empathise with a professional assassin!

Michael Weston is an assassin specializing in sniper hits. He doesn’t get close literally or figuratively; he asks no questions about the why behind the hit, just gets the job done. But when his latest job ends up putting the police on his tail, he has to start asking questions, and fast. Does someone have it in for him? Well, apart from American private detective Leo Hoffer, who’s been pursuing Weston for years at the behest of a client whose daughter Weston killed on a previous job instead of his actual target. Thus begins a chase on both sides of the Atlantic that ends on the west coast of the United States.

I liked this book better than the first Jack Harvey novel, Witch Hunt. Perhaps the first person narration was what sold it show more for me. Or maybe it was Belinda, the daughter of Weston’s weapons provider, Max. Belinda comes along as Weston goes on the run and she proves a resourceful, tenacious sidekick to Weston as he hunts down the truth. Either way, I thought this was good. It took me much longer to read than I would have liked, though, thanks to a combination of pandemic brain and reading this in a giant Jack Harvey omnibus, which proved a bit unwieldy. show less

I am a fan of Ian Rankin, especially of his Rebus series, but I’ll read anything he has written. So I was delighted to find this book which was written by Rankin under the nom de plume of Jack Harvey. This book was written in 1994 before the modern era of terrorism but the descriptions of gun violence sound like they could come of the front pages of today’s newspapers.
Michael Weston is a hired assassin. He has been called the D-Man or Demolition Man because he likes to set off a small explosion near the site of his sniper attacks. He has been hired, through an intermediary he trusts, to kill a female journalist. The contract included information about where she will be at an exact time on a particular day and what she will be show more wearing. He carries out the hit but is almost caught by the police who showed up just after the woman was killed before anyone could have called them to report the killing. Weston manages to escape by calling an ambulance and telling them he is a haemophiliac and has been injured. The ambulance shows up and takes him to the hospital right under the noses of the police. Then Weston starts to wonder who tipped the police off and narrows it down to a few people, one of whom is the intermediary who set up the contract. He goes to see Max who lives in remote Yorkshire with his daughter Belinda. Max also supplies illegal firearms so Weston knows him quite well. He doesn’t think it could be Max but he thinks Max will know who ordered the hit. Max refers him to a criminal in London so Weston goes back to London with Belinda (Bel) in tow to provide cover. They can’t find the man they are looking for but manage to find out that the journalist was working on a story about a cult called the Disciples of Love and perhaps they ordered the hit. So Weston and Bel start looking into the cult which takes them to Scotland and then to Washington State in the USA. Hot on their heels is a New York detective who wants to catch Weston because he accidentally killed a young woman who was the daughter of a very wealthy man. Following the detective are some malevolent Americans who could be CIA. Everyone ends up at the headquarters of the Disciples of Love on the Olympic Peninsula and mayhem ensues.
The book is dedicated to Elliott and Fawn who are Elliott Abrams and Fawn Hall, names which will be familiar to some from the Iran-Contra Affair. It would give away a key part of the plot to say why Rankin chose them but he was inspired by real events showing that truth is stranger than fiction. show less

Can tell Rankin had a lot of fun writing this one, off the Rebus chain. The plot careers all over the place, geographically and logically. The funding he got to research and write in the USA didn't go to waste. A lot of gun and car names. The relationship stuff is a bit meh. It always is. There are several signature Rankin "boasted"s, though nobody "gets busy" in this one. The whole thing doesn't make too much sense, but it's enjoyable in a pulpy way. And there's some quite complicated shifting of voice and person and time that is perhaps actually done better than in several Rebuses (Rebi?).

Goodness me, this is a too long and too wearisome crime thriller. There’s a lot of pursuing the criminals and running away from the good guys, or running away from the criminals and pursuing the good guys, depending on whose point of view you’re in at the time. Not that anyone is really good at all, by any measure. There are two leads – the private detective and the hit man – but neither is hero or villain. This of course is a very realistic approach to take, but it does mean that the reader roots for neither – or possibly both, but for me it was neither as I didn’t find either of them likeable or interesting.

I did quite enjoy the fact that the hit man was a haemophiliac though as that was a nice twist. But that’s as about show more as good as it got – though I do accept I’m probably not the prime target for this novel. It’s best classed as a boys-with-toys thriller. Because there are a lot of guns in all sorts of different scenarios and it was exhausting trying to keep up with the technicalities of them all. So in the end I didn’t bother. I didn’t bother much with the plot either as it was very clichéd and had – again – lots of different groups in different countries up to no good and running around a great deal. Sigh.

Really, by about a quarter of the way through, I was just glancing over the bare outlines of what might have been going on, and trying to finish the pesky beast as quickly as I could. There’s a girl (who is far more boring than she ought to be as the female lead) and a dead father, a journalist or several, various gun suppliers and some police. Please add your own plot as you expect it to be and you won’t be far wrong.

That said, Spike’s niece, Jazz, was great fun and I wished for more of her, but it was not to be, alas. To cap it all, the ending is the ultimate cliché to end all clichés and not worth the getting there. show less

Ian Rankin is human after all! I thought it impossible for him to write what I would consider a poor book, but this, albeit released under the nom de plume 'Jack Harvey', fits that bill perfectly.

The story is that of a hit man who suffers from haemophilia. He is hired to kill a journalist but, is almost caught at the scene due to information which only his client could know. Our "hero", decides to track down and deal with this nasty person.

The plot takes us around the British Isles and America with heaps of testosterone filled action. Naturally, our hero and most of his friends escape with their lives: the only exception being the weapons seller whose daughter our hero fancies. His death makes their tryst acceptable.

The denouement is show more the final let down in this work. Having struggled through three hundred and ninety-seven pages of gratuitous violence, the final five pages include every corny plot line ever created.

I am pleased to have read this book for two reasons; firstly, as proof that even the great can have off days and, secondly, because I know that I will never find another such poor offering under the name Rankin. show less

I won't give it away but I was disapponited in the ending. The ride getting there, however, is great. Rankin creates great characters and crafts a good yarn. In this book the lines between protagonist and villian are thinly drawn as the killer is likable and the cop is the worst type of person. I've also seen a growing trend to combine perspectives in novels. This one uses first and third depending on which character's POV is used. Worth the read.