Customer Reviews

The Fireman

5 star:		(0)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
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1 star:		(0)

 

 

I have lived in Hong Kong since 1996, the last 5 years on an intermittant basis but this book captures the esscence of the city so well, you can almost picture the places as they are depicted in the book. It really is a walk down old memory lane to read about Makati, Dickens Bar, Kowloon Cricket Club and as a former resident of Yeung Leung I am no stranger to triad activity. As an overview of the City that the lonely planet guide will never provide, this book is worth its cover price for this alone.

The story itself is no where near as pacy as the Dan Sheppard Books but the plot quite cleverly unfolds. The Character Lau is fascinating as he can be incredibly cold but exteremely loving of Sally the murdered sister and also callous when dishing out his own form of rough justice in the books climax.

I found the storyline at times a bit hot and cold but the ambience of Hong Kong picked up the low points. The climax was very good as a chess match of mind games unfolded over dinner.

Definently not one of Stephen Leather's best books but just as Private Dancer captured Thailand to Perfection, this does the same with Hong Kong.

Of the many thrillers by Stephen Leather, I've read to date only THE CHINAMAN, THE STRETCH, PAY OFF, and this, THE FIREMAN, so my opinion of him as an author is still evolving. And I have six more of his books lined up on the shelf to read, with many more on my wish list.

Like the previous three, the theme of THE FIREMAN is revenge. As in PAY OFF, the reader never learns the protagonist's name. In this case, he's a correspondent for a London rag - let's call him "Bob" - who learns that his sister Sally, a freelance journalist, has taken a dive off a Hong Kong high-rise. Was it suicide or murder? Traveling to the Crown Colony - the book was first published in 1989, eight years before Red China took over the property - Bob is convinced she was murdered. Now, he's got to find out why and even the score.

Stephen Leather was himself a writer for Hong Kong's "South China Morning Post". His familiarity with the city shows and provides an ambience to the plot that's perhaps the book's best feature. Unfortunately, there's not the same cleverness that I admired in THE STRETCH, where the protagonist is the wife of a British underworld boss forced to take over the business when Hubby is put behind bars, or THE CHINAMAN, where the hero is a Vietnamese immigrant to the UK out to exact vengeance on the IRA for a London bomb that caught his daughter in the collateral damage. THE FIREMAN reads more like a mediocre detective story. Only on page 192, when the reader becomes privy to an unsuspected aspect of Bob's relationship with Sis, did I do a mental double-take and think "Say, what!?" But Leather never develops this surprise further, and his hero eventually marches to the volume's conclusion never seeming as truly driven as he should be under the circumstances, and the ending was curiously flat.

I gather that THE FIREMAN was one of the author's earlier works. While I might have given it four stars in a vacuum, in comparison with the other three, especially THE CHINAMAN and THE STRETCH, three is max.