Customer Reviews

High Order

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Loved it! Even better than his first one! Had me riveted... read the whole thing in one sitting. Loved the ending. You won't be disappointed.

I was riveted to this book. I was on the edge of my chair/bed (depending where I was reading) and chewing my nails...a habit I broke years ago. I had NO idea where it was going or how it would end. This word is used far too often, but in this case it truly fits, 'High Order' was AWESOME! Thanks so much, for the research you put into this project, and the creative imagination you have going on in your head to provide the reader with such an intensely forceful chronicle, about members of our society that can one day, seem profoundly "normal", and due to phenomenon that occurs either early in life, or completely out of the blue in the present, become a mad, dangerously crazed, lunatic the next.

High Order written by Mike Sutton is a bone chilling multi-murder mystery that will keep readers racing through its pages from the explosion in the first few until the very ending in the epilogue.

In the story, Jim Grabowski is Baltimore's Lead Bomb Technician who risks his life each time a suspicious package or gadget is suspect as a bomb threat. Many times the threats are bogus. But on those occasions where the lives of others are at risk, Jim and the men he works with endanger their own lives trying to determine if a suspect device is armed, and if it is, how to defuse or explode it safely.

In High Order, the wife of a 70-year-old man is hideously murdered. Although two people do not witness the actual butchery, quite by happenstance, the husband and wife secretly see the killer toss the corpse into a dumpster. Both know the auto's make and license number.

Hassled police hope they finally have an open and shut case against a serial murderer who has raped and slaughtered several other women. He follows a routine which has now become familiar to detectives. The two witnesses independently identify the killer from a line-up.

But the enormously wealthy father of his alleged killer son is able to hire a high-priced lawyer who buys-out prosecution's top two witnesses. Given enormous sums of money to pay off their home and to pay for a much needed medical procedure for their own ailing son, conveniently, neither witness can recall with certainty what they saw the night of the murder, or the murderer's automobile license number. Frustrated, the judge must release the young suspected serial killer.

However, the 70-year-old widower learns of the witness buy-out. He will not let his wife's murder go unavenged. At his age, he feels he has nothing left to lose. An extremely intelligent man and an electronics expert, he secures deadly materials to build cleverly camouflaged bombs he'll use to execute the unethical lawyer, his wife, and eventually the young man who dodged a murder rap. Then he will join his wife in death by killing himself, after he finds a technique that will not hint of suicide which would degrade his family's name.

Throughout High Order, each time a bomb detonates and Jim Grabowski is forced to investigate, the reader is somehow glad to see justice done, even knowing that murder for revenge is morally wrong. Of course, the old man is devastated when his killing bombs accidentally destroy the lives of innocent people.

So, two deadly threads run a collision course through High Order:
1. Will the serial killer eventually be caught?
2. Will the 70-year-old widower be stopped before he kills those responsible for the infamous trial of his wife's murderer?

Only the reader of this taut nerve wracking thriller will find out. By far, even though most of us consider murder wrong, I found this book hard not to read. At the beginning of the book, I thought I should NOT be reading about such atrocities: rape, murder, hatred, bombings. Yet I must confess I couldn't help myself. I had to find out what happened to the villainous men in High Order.

I would recommend this book as a great read but not for the squeamish. The writing style of Mike Sutton is precise and accurate--downright gory at times--suggestive more of horror. But in the end, High Order is redeeming because it portrays an inside view into the unimaginable crimes that police and detectives must deal with, live with, look at, and try to forget; sights that most of us never have to face.

Other fascinating reads:
The Chimera Seed
The Island Off Stony Point
Fixing Forever Broken
The National Contender