Customer Reviews

Levels

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The Levels would seem to have all the right elements in place here for a strong thriller, but for some reason it just doesn't really seem to work. There's a gritty urban inner-city setting of a district ruled by a strange cult known as the Tower with an enigmatic leader known as Sorrow, there are two strong characters who have to form alliances to survive the mean streets and underground tunnels of the district, and there's no shortage of danger, action and revelations, but while it carries the reader along well enough, the narrative never really engages on a deeper level.

There's at least no faulting the backgrounds of the two main characters. Turner is an ex-CIA agent, who is surprised to hear on the news that he has been killed by an unknown assassin at his apartment. Very much alive, Turner believes that the authorities know it's someone else who has been killed in his place, but sure that someone unknown is after him and therefore in collusion with the police, he decides that it's better to lie low and find out for himself what is going on. Kate Friedman meanwhile is an ex-cop who would like to do the same thing, having been implicated through association with her police officer husband's corrupt activities, but her past won't go away that easily. When she is attacked by an unknown assailant, she finds herself reluctantly caught up in a manhunt led by a mysterious organisation, where her life depends on finding the man who has infected her with a lethal virus. Inevitably the two threads come together, the hunt to find out what is going on taking them both to the Levels, a grim, lawless housing complex abandoned by the Newport City authorities that holds and buries its own secrets.

There's certainly plenty of intrigue in the situation of both characters as well as in the unusual alliances that they both form in order to find their way through the labyrinthine housing project with its own laws and dangerous ruling authorities, Turner teaming up with a young girl known as Ghost, an escapee from a dangerous cult holding sway over the inhabitants of the Levels, while Kate finds herself involved with a shadowy but clearly powerful organisation on the trail of a dangerous man known as the Sixth Avenue Beast. The depiction of the Levels themselves is fine also, a credible vision of a dark lawless urban nightmare in which to set this.

Events move fast and are hard-hitting, there being urgency and quite an amount of personal danger involved in the predicament not only of both main characters, but also with all the other agencies involved in the manhunt. However, while there are certainly revelations and horrors to be uncovered, essentially the thriller aspects of The Levels remain on the level of it being indeed little more than a manhunt, involving a great deal of chases, captures and escapes, the main characters sustaining near-miss injuries along the way to keep up the tension. That's fine as far as it goes, the author Sean Cregan (a pseudonym for Jon Rickards) giving the reader enough in the way of characterisation and plot to keep involved, but not enough to really care about the outcome one way or the other.