Starred review from May 15, 2017
Set in Prague, Hart’s Kafkaesque fourth novel featuring amateur PI Ash McKenna (after 2016’s South Village) has great pace, a fascinating relationship between the central characters, and superb atmosphere. Driven from his New York City home by his personal demons, Ash has nearly come to the end of his three-month visa in Prague when he encounters a latter-day Mephistopheles calling himself Roman and claiming to be an emissary of a shadowy unnamed U.S. government agency. By threatening Ash’s mother, Roman compels Ash to retrieve a thumb drive or small laptop from a brash Czech spook, Samantha Sobolik, supposedly a U.S. bank employee. The job explodes in their faces, hurling Ash and Sam headlong into murky international intrigue and corruption. Born out of the hard-boiled wisecracking tradition and able to swing his fists as well as Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer, Ash just wants to make someone’s life better, keep his mother safe, and pay homage to his father, a firefighter who died heroically on 9/11. Noir fans will be enthralled. Agent: Bree Ogden, D4EO Literary Agency.
May 1, 2017
Having left the United States to escape his past, amateur PI Ash McKenna has drifted to the Czech capitol of Prague. There he is approached by a shadowy man named Roman who blackmails him into intercepting a package carried by bank employee Samantha Sobolik. But even the best-laid plans often go awry, and it turns out that the information drop is actually an assassination attempt. Soon competing spies are emerging to target Ash and Sam. Out of his element and in over his head, Ash must trust and abide by the famous Moscow Rules (a checklist of ten espionage tips developed during the Cold War) to survive. VERDICT Hart's fast-moving series adventure fuses gritty noir elements with high-octane international suspense; although this is the fourth title in the series (after South Village), it can be read as a stand-alone.--ACT
Copyright 2017 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.
May 1, 2017
Here's a spy thriller in all the genre's old-school glory. There's a haunted hero longing for purification and something to take the place of my vices. A shadowy figure who wears a sweater with a high thread count, compares the spy business to a chess game, and says, There's more going on here than you could possibly understand. And, yes, there's a blond. Series hero Ash McKenna is cooling down in Prague when the man with the sweater recruits him to follow the blondher name is Samanthaand intercept a package exchange on a bridge. The exchange quickly turns into a hit, and Ash and Samantha find themselves at once pursued and pursuers. Ash struggles to understand the layers of deceit; Samantha seems to know, but she isn't saying. Her mysteriousness, along with her knowledge of Krav Maga (the Israeli self-defense technique)and her deadpan put-downs of Ash, allow her to steal the book. Their constant verbal jousting is as much fun as the fight scenes. The explanations she offers toward the end don't explain everything, but that's fine. We want to keep her mysterious and see her again soon.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2017, American Library Association.)
June 15, 2017
Ashley McKenna, the jack-of-many-trades who's not exactly a private eye, expands his portfolio in an adventure that casts him as not exactly a spy.Ash is working as a "blunt instrument" for Stanislav, an old friend's cousin who runs Crash Hop, Prague's answer to Airbnb, when a man calling himself Roman turns up flanked by a pair of enforcers and asks Ash to follow Hemera Global Bank employee Samantha Sobolik till she picks up a mysterious package, grab the package, and turn it over to him. When Ash demurs, Roman trots out a long list of Ash's earlier peccadilloes (South Village, 2016, etc.) and threatens to reveal them to the authorities. When Ash still refuses, Roman offers to kill his mother, whose Staten Island address he helpfully provides. That information supplies enough motivation to get Ash moving but not enough to keep him in Roman's pocket. Shortly after he's nearly killed by Chernya Dyra, the former Spetszaz agent Samantha meets on the Charles Bridge at 4 a.m., Ash finds himself tagging along with Sam: if he's not entirely on her side, he's not entirely committed to robbing or betraying her, either. Since Ash is no stranger to violent episodes that are not so much mysterious as surreal, and since he has few qualms about killing his own enemies, there'll be lots of action, none of it (spoiler alert) involving Ash's mother, in the service of a diabolical plot that's at once so simple, so incredible, and so logical that it's the best feature of this uneven fourth installment. "At least now there's some momentum," the hero reflects in a rare quiet moment after a beating leaves him aching and nursing a broken nose. Whatever you think of his here-today-gone-tomorrow fortunes, you have to admire that Zenlike attitude toward the work that isn't even his chosen career.
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