Jeffrey Keeten's Reviews > The Break Line

”Almost every day began like that, robbed of clarity by a night of searing dreams. It was easier waking up in the war. Any war. At least I knew where I was then.”

Maximilian McLean has a problem. He makes a decision that goes against his orders. He lets a target live. A woman who does not fit the profile he has been given, but she has seen his face, so by protocol she is supposed to die anyway.

He lets her live because he doesn’t want to knowingly kill an innocent person. He has been trained to kill without question, so his handlers in London are suddenly wondering if he has outlived his usefulness, which means they can promote him or kill him. There seems to be some disagreement on which course is the best action.

They send him to one of the most dangerous spots on the planet...Sierra Leone. A man he respects as the consummate soldier and assassin has returned from Sierra Leone a change man, broken and scared. ”Sonny Boy had been deeply disturbed, actually driven mad by something he’d encountered in-country. For days I had wondered what that something could have been. After shining my torch on the face of the dead squaddie outside Kabala I felt one step closer to finding out. A face frozen in mortal terror like that was not just uncommon: in my experience it was unique.”

So if he discovers the truth and manages to survive whatever foul incarnation is out in the jungles of Africa, will London let him live, or will they get him with a lights out bullet to the brain?

Who is the professor?

What are the Russian Spetsnaz doing out in the jungle?

How are the CIA connected?

How can the girl he let go possibly be connected to what is going on in Sierra Leone? ”No good deed goes unpunished.”

Can someone give Max a list of everyone trying to kill him? The list is getting too long and convoluted to figure out without a large white board with arrows and lines connecting the dots.

So he has the professor in the sight of his scope. ”My heart all but stopped, the beat so slow. I am tethered to the bullet, my mind filled with single certainty. The man is already dead even though the shot is not yet taken. The target’s name has already been written in the Book of the Dead.”

Except, well, the professor isn’t who he expects him to be. In fact, he isn’t expected to know him at all. The list of madmen he personally knows is rather short because most of them are dead soon after meeting him. There is hell, and then there is dousing the walls of hell with kerosene. Things are getting too hot, even for a man with his skill set. They are creating creatures that can upset the hierarchy of man. They are something uncategorized in the animal kingdom, except in the pages of genre fiction.

”The nearer they got, the more manifest their hideousness. Every muscle strained, bulged, as if fit to burst, embossed with veins that stood out like tramlines riding across sinew. Their eyes were wild and rolled back, so that their irises vanished into a blur of white-eyed horror. And their mouths--wide open, lips pulled taut--sent forth waves of ululating screeches.”

Every decision Max McLean has ever made in his life seems to be rippling forward to land on his ass while he is in the middle of the most horrendous set of circumstances that no amount of training could have prepared him for.

If he can survive those things in the jungle and make his way back to civilisation, will civilisation have already decided that he isn’t much better than those things in the jungle?

Heart pounding action, with more than a few tingles of apprehension that always happen to me when speculative fiction borders on the possible. The writing style of James Brabazon seems stilted to me in the first few pages, but it soon becomes apparent that the style fits the nature of the book, and the rocket speed with which the plot sweeps me along shortly has me completely immersed in asking why, what, who, where, and how? I know the when; it happens right now in the pool of light from my reading lamp.

I want to thank Rafa Ashraf and Berkley Publishing for supplying me with a free copy in exchange for an honest review.

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