Customer Reviews

The Pious Agent

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The act of reading a good book is a distraction from reality, a time to relax and immerse oneself into a narrative that constructs a world that in no way resembles that of the reader's reality. John Braine's foray into the espionage thriller succeeds in distracting the reader from the distraction that they happen to be participating in. All through the story the villain's plot is unclear and, as the pages turn, it is discovered that there happens to be more than one villain and they are all working independently against each other!

The hero is Xavier Flynn, a Roman Catholic killer working for Britain's Home Office who has the annoying habit of falling on his knees and praying every so often. While his self-imposed piety doesn't seem to deter him from chasing and bedding the odd lady, it does tend to add horror to the sanctioned killings that he carries out. There's something psychotic about a government assassin praying for the souls of the people he has been ordered to kill. Coupled to this fact is the author's penchant of peopling the novel with so many named characters that it becomes difficult to keep track of them all. Everybody, in this book, gets a name including the collateral damage that makes his appearance already stone-cold dead and the wife, of another victim, who never makes an appearance at all!

This is definitely a book you will only ever read once and, unlike 'War and Peace', you will spend the rest of your life wondering if you're a better person for having done so.