Customer Reviews

Even

5 star:		(24)
4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(9)
2 star:		(10)
1 star:		(10)

 

 

This kind of crime story is like a chess game, a formalized drama that can only be appreciated as it unfolds, elaborate layer after layer. Each move has more significance than first appears, only the beginning of an intricate design, a finely crafted thriller. It begins innocently enough when David Trevellyan discovers the body of a murdered homeless man in a New York alley. A member of the Royal Navy, David has undergone extensive training in all phases of espionage and spy craft, a finely-tuned machine dominated by logic and speedy reactions to threat.

When Trevellyan is arrested for the homeless man's death, it takes him a while to determine that he is a pawn in a scheme he has yet to understand, one that begins with the FBI and the NYPD, but soon expands to a wider theater, including an obscure hospital in Iraq. At the start, Trevellyan is just a British operative trying to get back to London, but by the end, in concert with the FBI, he is on the inside of a high-stakes plot with disastrous ramifications. Along the way, there are an assortment of bureaucrats and agents, a disturbing scene with a female who uses a unique instrument of torture to induce cooperation, various rogues, thugs and bodyguards of varying skills, an impressive array of weapons, drugs, explosives and, of course, a potent terrorist plot.

Younger brother of Lee Child, Grant steps up with this taut, well-written tale that builds with each chapter to the final standoff. The urbane, smooth Englishman stands back from the American agents, albeit usually one step ahead, using his skill set to avoid traps and outwit the masterminds of a clever scheme. Each chapter is prefaced with a few paragraphs of Trevellyan's past, each with a lesson learned. That lesson is further elaborated in the following chapter, yet another level of legerdemain on the part of this author. Comparison to other writers of this genre is unavoidable, but unnecessary. Grant is clearly a pro, with a complicated, fast-paced plot that is riddled with threat, the bad guys- and woman- just as evil as we imagine and oblivious to the horrors they visit upon their victims. This tech-savvy thriller gives considerable food for thought. Old world spy craft gives way to more modern and deadly applications. Trust me. You'll be back for more. Luan Gaines/2009.

David Trevellyan is a British Navy intelligence officer (his specific role is somewhat vague) who is wrapping up a job in the US when he discovers a recently murdered tramp lying in a dark alleyway. He is swiftly apprehended by the police department who then pass him onto the FBI. The body was actually an undercover FBI agent and Trevellyan is now the FBI's prime suspect.

The book starts well and grabs your attention, but from there it loses its way. The plot is overly complicated with two main strands that are only tenuously linked. So about half way through the book it stops being about one silly plot and starts being about another. Trevellyan ends up working with the FBI on the cases - a development that doesn't feel even remotely believable.

There are parts of this book that are exciting and well written, but they are few between with far too many long conversations and erratic changes in direction. Ultimately I got bored, and also confused by the large cast of sketchily drawn characters. The ending is quite abrupt and with at least one villain still on the loose, sets up the book for a sequel.

Grant starts each chapter with Trevellyan disclosing a little more information about his past or an anecdote from his naval training. While this occasionally feels forced, these sections gave a tantalizing glimpse of the novel that this might have been. His writing style has many similarities to that of his brother (Lee Child), but the novel lacks the punch of the Reacher series.

People are comparing this book to the Reacher series because the author is Lee Child's brother. If Grant wants to write a book that has the same character as Jack Reacher, then we have to compare the two characters and authors.

The plot is that Grant's character, David, sees a body in an ally, and he goes to check it out. The police come and find him over the body. What David doesn't know is that he's being set up, and he has to figure out who set him up, why, and to clear his name. This plot has been done over and over and over again. Grant brings nothing fresh to the table. Grant has a very dry writing style.

Grant's char of David, seems flat and uninteresting. He could easily clear up the problem, but he doesn't. David seems to have a smart mouth and it makes him seem guilty of the crimes that he's innocent of.

Lee Child's books are fast paced with incredible plots, neat twists, fantastic characters, and hooks the reader in. Even, does none of those things. It's easy to see that Grant tries to copy Child's sense of writing style but falls way short. Grant bogs the reader down with a lot of needless description of everything. It was like I was walking through mud, and it was a chore to read.

At the start of each chapter, we are able to get some words or wisdom that David has learned over the years that sets the tone for the chapter. I found this very annoying.

If you feel the need to read this book, skip it. Pick up and book by Lee Child and read about the character of Jack Reacher, and you won't be sorry.

Lee Child does it right, Andrew Grant does it wrong.

Andrew Grant's book does not read like a debut novel. You'd think a seasoned author wrote this one. I couldn't put it down. And wait until you read the ending...it will leave you wanting more from this talented newcomer.

Grant doesn't know from thriller pacing. He stops and starts, and re-explains, and then stops again for interminable observation of things that rarely amount to anything in the plot and don't lead the reader to heightened understanding--he just doesn't seem to be able to stop himself.

Chapters begin with fairly intriguing stories about special forces training, but they're pretty much the high points.

There's a torture scene that goes on for pages, minute detail after minute, mechanical detail--Grant probably thought of it as "exquisite detail", but after a while you get bored and want to skip past it (yeah, yeah, torture, torture, I get it), which is the equivalent of wanting to skip the steamy stuff in porn to find out whether the horny housewife actually paid the swarthy plumber. What you're skipping ahead to isn't that interesting, but the writing is just good enough to make you hope it might be. Eventually. Luckily, it's not a long book.

He doesn't like the women characters at all, which makes it hard to believe his hero could be affected by anything that happens to them--it began to seem obvious that a final female betrayal was inevitable, since treachery was all the women could be trusted for, and I was bemused to find that Grant wanted us to take the hero's devotion seriously.

He shares with Lee Child a casual acceptance of vicious brutality, but doesn't make it particularly compelling, and intersperses it with those obsessive look-at-the-rivets-in-the-wall passages. Is even he interested in the story?

Fast-paced and unique, EVEN introduces a wonderful new character, David Trevellyan. EVEN rocks along relentlessly, it's a read-in-one-sitting kind of book. I can't wait to read more from Grant, he's breathed new life into the private spy thriller. Just great!

I picked this book off the library shelf based on Ridley Pearson's rave review on the dust jacket. But, while I like Pearson's novels and will continue to read them, this is the last time that I take one of his recommendations seriously. Call me old-fashioned, but I like novels with characters that bear some resemblance to real human beings and plots that display a modicum of ingenuity and narrative coherence. This book has neither. The characters are cartoon cut-outs who you wouldn't want to spend five minutes with if you met at a party and what passes for a plot is simply a series of implausible vignettes whose only common thread seems to be to create new situations for the hero to beat up somebody. Even the action scenes are laughably unrealistic; in real life the protagonist would have been dead by page fifty (which, all in all, wouldn't have been a bad result). Perhaps I'm being cynical, but I can't shake the suspicion that the glowing blurbs on the dust jacket are a result of the author's brother, Lee Childs, calling in a few favors. But to call this "noir" is an insult to the genre and to compare it to Fleming and le Carre is absolute drivel.

I ordered "Even" after meeting Mr. Grant at one of his brother's book signings. He seemed like an interesting and confident guy, and I admired him for writing a novel in the same genre that his brother dominates so handily.

I expected to inhale "Even" in a few adrenaline-charged hours as I've done a million times in the past with other spy/thriller novels written by a variety of authors. But here I am two months later, struggling to finish (I'm on page 233). I've never walked out of a movie, nor have I ever abandoned a book before the ending. So I force myself to read 5-10 pages at a time, as if I'm nursing a really wretched bottle of gin. I haven't had this much trouble finishing a book since my seventh grade teacher assigned "Johnny Tremain."

Here are some specifics:

(1) "Even" is shockingly lacking in details, which (to me) is an inexcusable flaw for this genre.

Grant's protagonist David Trevellyan is some sort of spy with the Royal Navy, and he specializes in corporate IT/communications security . . . I think. Why am I so vague about this fundamental aspect of the protagonst? Why hasn't Grant told me something cool and obscure about the Royal Navy? Who does David report to? If he's a telecomm guy, where is his cell phone? Why are his superiors (known collectively, unhelpfully, as "London") communicating through a British Consulate worker whom David hasn't seen for several years?

Maybe I'm wonkish or unreasonable for demanding so many details about Trevellyan's job. Maybe if I'd read more Ian Flemming I'd have an essential base-level knowledge of the inner-workings of British Spy agencies. Maybe I am a dim bulb or an ignoramus. But I've never experienced anything quite like this book, and I have been unbelievably frustrated by the vast number of questions that pop into my head at EVERY SINGLE PLOT POINT. In a nutshell, nothing that any of the characters does or says makes any sense to me.

E.g. How did Lesley's "gang" infiltrate both federal and state law enforcement? Why was she so powerful? Was she rich or politically connected? How did she recruit employees to fill positions in her "gang"? Why would anyone continue to work for Lesley given her habit of castrating employees when they underperformed? Would a group of heavily armed men really stand around and watch an unarmed woman castrate one of their colleagues?

E.g. Why would David and the female journalist have a ridiculously flirty conversation about luncheon meat while they were locked in dog kennels, awaiting a possibly dire fate? Why was David so confident that the thugs who locked him in a dog kennel would (a) let him go and (b) express a desire to work with him? How did he know that in advance?

I could bore you all day with these types of questions, so I'll move on.

(2) David Trevellyan is unlikable.

He reveals nothing to me about his job, which annoys me and makes me think that he isn't very good at it. Sure, he provides me with a bunch of trite observations about life and vague references to past events at the beginning of each chapter. But not enough to make me like him, respect him, or root for him to succeed. I don't even know what he wants to accomplish, besides reconnecting with the Consulate worker and going back to London. To that end, I very much want him to succeed just so I can finally say, "The End" and close this book forever.

My basic annoyance flared into outright contempt whenever David opened his mouth. I would never dream of rolling my eyes while a powerfully built British spy was speaking, but I found myself doing just that on countless occasions. 70% of the dialogue was excessively cheeky to the point of being, well, dorky. The other 30% was needlessly snarky. David's voice is that of a small man, and I kept having to remind myself of his physical stature and paramilitary training.

Grant proves from the outset that he's no rookie---this book reads like someone's tenth. It's without question the best novel I've read this year. Could not put it down and can't wait for the next.

I didn't know when I read this book, that Andrew Grant is Lee Child's younger brother. Hope there's not much sibling rivalry because Lee Childs' Jack Reacher character has some competition in British Navy Lt. Commander David Trevellyan. Set in New York City, Trevellyan is some kind of covert special ops guy who has just finished up a project and is walking back to his hotel after dining out on his last night in town. He is looking forward to his return to London the next day.

He passes an alley and sees a body on the ground. Stopping to check it out, he is shortly assuming the position as two New York cops, guns drawn, clearly suspect him of being the murderer - as do the two detectives who take him to the station. Trevellyan is depending on the British consulate to get him out of his cell and then the country since he - along with the reader - know he has nothing to do with the dead man in the alley.

Grant does a good job of setting up Trevellyan as a reasonably introspective tough guy. A swastika tattooed cell mate serves as our learning vehicle. Trevellyan is taciturn, cool, violent, a bit sadistic and calculating.

Off to a good start in the first few pages, Grant barrels along at breakneck speed introducing the FBI and several essentially unbelievable, but entertaining villains in quick order. By page 170, roughly midway through the book, the plot breaks down completely and becomes entirely ludicrous.

Much to Grant's credit, his writing is so good that I elected to go along with the increasingly unbelievable and silly plot because the story was just plain entertaining.

Trevellyan is quite the action hero. Others have compared him to le Carre and Fleming's creations. I don't agree. Trevellyan strikes me as far more like the late Mickey Spillane's Mike Hammer. He's bright, goal-oriented, more or less impervious to pain, insensitive and more than a tad sadistic.

He is also a master of the moment: no situation is too grave for him to master. You just can't keep a good man down, it seems, as Trevellyan squeezes triumph after triumph out of the most dire circumstances. This guy is just plain fictional fun. The Trevellyan character is still too early in his development to be fully compared to Jack Reacher, Mitch Rapp or (before he was wussed into nothingness) John Rain. Right now, Trevellyan is caricature and all the more fun because of it.

The villains are comic book funny, especially a particularly brilliant and savagely sadistic woman. The FBI guys are all buffoons, a day late and a dollar short. Trevellyan has a rather unique romantic interest, Tanya Wilson, whose character is totally unbelievable, but useful to advance the story. Other characters are introduced on an as-needed basis. Fans of Alfred Hitchcock films may take particular pleasure in how Grant handles such characters.

Finally - and this is a purely personal observation - Grant needs to pay more attention to his descriptions of technology. Too many authors don't seem to understand that there are a lot of people out there like me who know the technology and don't appreciate the blunders of an author who thinks they can pull a fast one. Or in this case a dozen or more fast ones. As I said, this is a purely person criticism.

So, why five-stars for a book with a ridiculous plot and mostly silly characters? Because it is page after page of adrenalin rousing action, that's why. There are only a few authors who can get away with something like this. Clive Cussler is probably the dean of them, a guy who can write utter nonsense and still keep readers turning pages. Andrew Grant is off to a great start. David Trevellyan could easily develop into a character on par with Jack Reacher and Mitch Rapp. He has a way to go, but his capacity for writing page turning action is already evident in "Even", a great leisure read - and a fast one too.

Jerry