A Quiet End

The book was disappointing after waiting so long for it to come out. Whilst I did enjoy the usual wit of the character John Corey, I felt the plot could have been more developed, it was very predictable and nothing like his other books. To me it felt like a book he had to write for contractual reasons. It was also confusing when trying to download the book as I did not realise the title was going to be 'A Quiet End' here in Australia - why do publishers do that, it makes no sense at all. It was explained in the book what a 'radiant angel' was so why change it?

Nelson DeMille’s speciality is the blockbuster thriller. It’s nothing so humdrum as plotting to kill your lover’s spouse. It will be a plot to kill the President or, as in this case, to explode a terror nuclear bomb in an American city.

This gives the author the opportunity to go to town. The petty rivalries of an everyday thriller give place to superpowers fighting. The locations will be exotic and the characters larger than life.

DeMille’s situations are always imaginative but often improbable. That’s the way the genre works. The story gets held together by masterful story-telling and interesting characters.

John Corey is not one of DeMille’s best heroes. My favourite is The Charm School’s Sam Hollis, a loose cannon who goes looking for trouble. Sam Hollis has a saturnine Jack Dee personality and the result is extremely witty dialog. John Corey isn’t remotely in the same class. He’s just a smartass, albeit a very proficient one, good at what he does.

His partner in this adventure is Tess Faraday, a clinically perfect superwoman. For her sake DeMille overcomes his phobia for providing any physical description of his characters at all: she is “maybe early thirties, auburn hair, tall, trim, and attractive.” (Only now do I note the Oxford comma, of which I approve.) She is an operative for State Department Intelligence, which surprised me. So high-powered a person should be running operations from behind a desk, surely? Instead of being a mere grunt working out in the field. DeMille struggles to create realistic women characters.

John and Tess are up against Vasily Petrov, a Russian death-squad agent with ice-water running through his veins. The key element of the plot is that once Vasily launches his mission, he cannot be recalled. This makes it a suicide mission, not only for Vasily, but for Russia as well. It would have taken the barest minimum of thinking to plug this huge plot hole. In fact it would have made the story more exciting, if both the Americans and the Russians had been trying to stop Vasily. The Russians have also provided backup in the form of one Mikhail, an utter incompetent who like Bugs Bunny swings his fist ten times around his head before hitting anyone. If the good guys captured Mikhail while making his escape, his entire reason for being in the story would vanish. DeMille should rather have left him out.

The beta readers and editing team must have pointed out the problems to DeMille, but I guess that best-selling authors get hissy fits if one word of the manuscript is changed. I blame the publishing business model too. As with a smartphone with known security weaknesses and a screen that cracks if you even look at it, the publishers are aware that the product has big shortcomings, but deadlines and budgets mean that they have to ship it anyway.

As blockbuster international thrillers go, this one is pretty darn good. Most novelists would give anything to have DeMille’s ability. But DeMille isn’t competing with them; I’m comparing A Quiet End with the best of his earlier books. And I was somewhat disappointed.

I enjoyed this book, the plot was exciting, the characters well-developed and the settings believable. But like many reviewers I found this novel to be considerably inferior to the author's other work. I've read all the John Corey novels and at least five others, many of which I would have given five stars. So what was wrong with this one? For me, Corey was slightly harder to like, which is disappointing in a character you've grown to love and empathise with. And for those of us familiar with the charactes the Kate situation repeatedly hinted at was both unconvincing and totally unnecessary to the plot, unless it's going to be resolved in another book? Speaking of the plot, while possibly more feasible than some of the other disasters Corey has saved us from, it lacked some of the twists, turns and surprises which usually keep us alert right to the final pages. Had this book been by an unknown author I may have rated it more highly, because I DID enjoy it. As it is, I didn't give it a lower rating out of respect for the many, many hours of reading pleasure the author and his characters have given me in the past, and because my expectations had been lowered by existing reviews, as well as the fact that we have to use whole stars and not decimals!
On another note, the confusion about the book having two titles has been cleared up in the the store store.

I have already reviewed this book as Radiant Angel.
WHAT I OBJECT TO IS APART FROM A REVIEWER THERE IS NO the store MENTION OF THE FACT THAT THIS IS THE SAME BOOK. Please see my review of Radiant Angel. I was not impressed

Waited too long for this, which only made it more of a disappointment. Lacked many of the qualities I had come to enjoy & expect. This novel was too contrived, too full of holes, too etc, that I thought it was an abridged version. I got the strong sense it was thrown together to satisfy some timeframe.

Think DeMille mailed this book in from his Gold Cost Cottage. Not anywhere as good as his past novels, but then again, Up Country and Plumb Island were when he had his head in the game. Now he is cashing the checks.