Customer Reviews

Redemption

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

 

 

WOW! What a powerful book. I average 3 books a week, all fiction, and usually
best selling crime fiction authors like: Michael Connelly, John Sandford, George
Pellicanos, Stephen Hunter, Lee Child, etc., but I don't rave about them... This
book, REDEMPTION, a first novel by author LEE JACKSON kept me spellbound until I
finished it. Even though fiction, it is about what can happen to any of us, even worse - all of us, or worse yet - already happening. An innocent man is persecuted kidnapped, tortured, and destroyed by our own govenment, and then used as a guinea pig, without benefit of any kind of defense, trial, conviction, or even acknowledgement of being human. Oh so too realistic... The story centers on what happens when he is unwittingly placed in a small community in Montana. Unlike what the first reviewer said, the protagonist is flawed--a result of his persecution.

This book might be fiction, but it sure seems like Lee Jackson can see into the future of real America. Everyone should read this book, it's scary and probably so close to true events that go on in our country that we don't want to beleive it. Call me radical or crazy, but he hit the nail on the head with this. Our beautiful free America, if it does not change, soon and quickly, is going right down this path. Laugh now, but if we remain in the steady state of decline that we are in at the present, it won't be long before themes Jackson presents in this book start happening. I hope I'm wrong, completely wrong and our economy and "world domination" way of dealing with the rest of the world changes. But, if I'm not, then this is just a small glimpse of life, in future America.

In a near-future USA, civil rights for accused terrorists have been further eroded, and a regular Joe white guy has been convicted of the crime, tortured, and now has tracking devices implanted in him. He arrives at a small town in Montana, is angelically good to everyone, and various sinister things happen. Okay novel, but the main character is too good to be believed. I get the point, of course, that suspending constitutional rights is a bad, bad, thing, but I'd have preferred the victim to be believably flawed while the novelist made this point. Six months after reading this, I'm posting the review, and I cannot remember how the thing ended, nor do I care enough about the book to look it up.

I started this book before bed and never put in down before I finished. It was a haunting and too familiar story of what can happen in an Orwellian America that fears terror more than it loves civil liberties.

Set in the very near future (about 2-5 years or so), this semi-thriller strives to weave together various manifestations of impending doom in an attempt to tell a cautionary tale of civil liberties. Protagonist Ben Trinity (a simply terrible name) is an ex-con taking part in an experimental probation scheme. However, Ben is not the white collar fraudster he claims, but an alleged terrorist held and tortured in rendition centers for the last several years. It seems that the "war on terror" has been amped up, and there are now thousands of disappeared terror suspects. So many that the government is trying to figure out how to deal with the harmless ones -- hence the new probation program Ben is part of. (If this all seems wildly implausible, that's because it is. If the political climate were such that large numbers of people were getting rounded up, it's hard to see why the same system would be that concerned with releasing them.)

In any event, in addition to rather streamlined civil liberties (which go hand in hand with large-scale use of biometrics and national ID systems), it seems that America is slowly succumbing to the effects of peak oil and trade imbalances, resulting in substantial recession. En route to a job in the Seattle area, Ben is snowbound in Montana, and winds up in the small town of Redemption (the author's lack of subtlety in naming seems to know no bounds). There, he meets kindly locals who take him in, and he manages to make a solid, if spartan, new life. Alas, a local cop starts snooping and uncovers his true identity, leading most of the town to turn against him -- all of which develops into a rather straightforward examination of mob mentality. However, the intervention of a native American cop (oh, the symbolism...) leads to a battle among various bureaucrats as to the true nature of Ben's alleged crime.

While Ben himself is a highly sympathetic and engaging character, and the people around him are well-drawn and believable, the story as a whole fails to really catch fire. It's pretty predictable in its assault on the national security apparatus, and the main villain of the story is somewhat over the top. The problem with a lot of cautionary storytelling is that it can easily become preachy, and that's what happens here.