Retrophisch

“There is no hunting like the hunting of man, and those who have hunted armed men long enough and liked it, never care for anything else thereafter.” —Ernest Hemingway, Death in the Afternoon

Hemingway’s words succeeded Richard Connell’s The Most Dangerous Game by eight years. While the two authors were contemporaries in the sense they both were influenced by World War I and were most prolific in the interwar decades, there’s no real evidence that Hemingway was influenced by Connell’s work. Yet I imagine had he read it, based on his own experiences, Hemingway would have nodded right along.

In The Most Dangerous Man, Jack Murphy has crafted a modern retelling of The Most Dangerous Game, and has done an incredible job doing so.

Jeremy Lopez is a US Army Ranger, and a member of the little-known and very secretive Regimental Reconnaissance Company. He works as part of the intelligence gathering apparatus for JSOC, the Joint Special Operations Command, helping units like Delta Force or SEAL Team Six on their missions against high value targets. Unlike most in the intelligence business, Lopez is very much hands-on: he is on the ground, providing assistance in real time to the operators undertaking the mission at hand.

Currently working in West Africa, upon the completion of a mission, Lopez retires to his hotel in Niger’s capital city, and the bar therein. Where he meets an utter bombshell of a woman, who just so happens to spike his drink. The next thing he knows, he’s in a locked cell, in a place only God knows where.

The cell itself is a bit of an anomaly. There’s a miniature gym inside it, and Lopez is not only fed three meals a day, he’s fed three very good meals a day. Someone’s taking care of him despite his captivity. The reason for which is soon made abundantly clear, and it is not in Jeremy’s favor.

Lopez has been captured, alongside another member of a fellow intelligence team, by a South African tracker leading a hunting party of wealthy patrons, most notably from Silicon Valley. After successful hunts against the Big Five game animals, the hunters were looking for a new challenge. Their guide managed to get them on to reservations in Africa where they could hunt poachers, with the covert blessing of the governments involved. Two birds, one stone and all.

But even that proved boring to the tech bros, so their guide came up with a new scheme: give them a game that had a real fighting chance against them. So a trap was set for a Western military man, preferably a commando of some type. While Lopez isn’t the Navy SEAL the hunters all hoped he would be, they will soon learn what his capabilities really are.

Murphy has crafted an amazing, adrenaline-fueled barnburner of a thriller with The Most Dangerous Man. His pacing is terrific. His humanizing of Lopez, showing his foibles as well as his strengths, only endears him to the reader and gives you a hero to really root for. Some might think his villains as almost cartoonish, but anyone who’s really paying attention to the real tech bros out there will know that their ideas and beliefs are not as far-fetched as one might think.

I simply couldn’t put this book down, blowing through it in three days, and two of those were spent working eight hours each, where I didn’t have as much time to read. The action is propulsive and heart-pounding, and the reader is often left wondering, along with Lopez, just how he is going to survive. I cannot recommend this one enough!

5/5 phins
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If you’ve ever wondered what Indiana Jones might be like in the modern day, Alex Dekker may be giving us a glimpse in his debut thriller, Desert Heist.

Raised on history and archaelogy by his academic father, Nathan Wilde is a Green Beret who left the US Army after years of service in the Middle East, culminating in a fierce battle in Yemen which left several teammates dead. Throwing himself back in to his studies, Nathan is working on his PhD, and his dissertation proposal is to search for the lost city of Ubar in present-day Saudi Arabia. When the proposal is rejected by the Harvard doctoral committee, Wilde decides to pursue the search on his own, convinced of the possibility of his own research.

Ultimately, he arrives at the conclusion that the only way he can move on is to throw caution to the wind and seek out the city himself. With all legal means of entering Saudi Arabia blocked, Wilde decides to enter the country’s infamous Empty Quarter through a place he’d like to forget: Yemen. Doing so means he’ll need help, and he turns to former Special Forces teammates for that. Along the way they are joined by Ana Metry, a geologist searching for her missing father, whom Nathan was attempting to contact, given his research on underground water tables in Saudi Arabia could prove helpful in locating Ubar.

The entire group is hunted by a former Spetsnaz operative, now working for a private client, which wants the information the elder Metry had discovered to remain secret. Not to mention dealing with Al Qaeda terrorists using the border towns of Yemen and Saudi Arabia as staging posts, and the utter harshness of the Empty Quarter itself.

Dekker brings his own background as a member of the elite Green Berets, and his love of history, to bear in Desert Heist. His knowledge in both areas shines through, lending weight and credibility to the plot and characters without weighing the story down. Nathan is far from a unstoppable Jack Reacher-like character. He is very human, and Dekker allows all the emotions of frustration, anger, and love flow through him for the reader to take in as the story progresses.

All in all, a solid debut, and one thriller fans should love!

4/5 phins
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Horror has never been a genre I have read a lot. For one, I don’t understand the desire to be scared. I’m sure a lot of that has to do with childhood little-t trauma about getting lost in a Halloween haunted house. For another, I can have an overactive imagination; I couldn’t finish the first season of The Walking Dead because the zombies were too realistic. (Though I never had that issue with reading the comics.)

Cosmic horror, as a genre, even less so. I’ve read a few Lovecraft stories here and there, but not enough that I would willingly read more, and I’ve avoided movies of the same, like Event Horizon. It’s just not my thing. Usually.

I made an exception with Yuval Kordov’s excellent The Shadow Over Psyche Station, and I’m so glad I did.

This is mostly because Yuval is one heck of a writer; his prose is so dense and deep, and it’s just a joy to read. There aren’t a lot of authors out there these days writing the way Yuval does; he hearkens back to science fiction and horror of decades past. Another reason is that I’ve become infatuated with the new-ish genre of incensepunk. While not Catholic or Orthodox, I did grow up in south Louisiana, where most of my friends were Catholic (or Catholic-adjacent). Thus, I know enough about Catholicism to get by, and nothing in this genre is a big surprise in terms of the denominational trappings.

Yuval is heavily involved with Incensepunk Magazine, and is a kindred spirit in that he, like me, is neither Catholic or Orthodox; though you wouldn’t know it to read his works, most of which fit in to incensepunk. We both have an outsider’s perspective we’re bringing to our enjoyment of the genre, and that mutual enjoyment is one reason why when he offered me the chance to read an advance copy of his next novella, I jumped right on it.

The Shadow Over Psyche Station is cosmic horror with incensepunk tones, a science-fiction tribute to Lovecraft’s The Shadow Over Inssmouth. It follows the trip of Imperial Assessor Marcus O. as he investigates the various orbital stations around the solar system that provide the numerous minerals and other necessities required to keep the Martian Empire going, now that Earth isn’t much help. The last station on his list is the one farthest out, and the one that hasn’t been in contact with the others for some time, Psyche Station. The station is woefully behind on its ore shipments back to the other stations as well as the Red Planet, and Marcus’ superiors want answers as to why.

As for Marcus himself, despite his occupation and the setting, he is a very relatable character. An everyman who, while wanting to be devout to God and the Empire, is also a just trying to do a good job and secure that next promotion, preferably one that doesn’t require any more excursions in to the void of space. Who among us hasn’t wanted to impress the boss enough to get a cushier gig?

The void itself is a bit of a character, but we’ll come back to that in a moment.

If the discomfort Yuval paints in the initial going about the cramped conditions of the shuttle rides between the stations isn’t enough for Marcus, what he finds on Psyche Station once he arrives only heightens how uncomfortable and out of his element he feels. He has contact with….no one. No one human, at least. The Psyche Station shuttle pilot is non-communicative, no one is there to greet him upon arrival, and the only “person” who appears to speak to him is a hologram AI. An AI which shouldn’t exist within the station. The tension only ratchets from there, as Marcus navigates to his assigned quarters and begins discovering more than he, or his superiors, bargained for.

I don’t want to give away too much of the plot from here, other than to say the psychological intensity is constantly ratcheted up. With every discovery, with every encounter, Marcus realizes how far gone he, and the Station, are. Especially when he feels pulled, nay, called, in to the Void. Down to 16 Psyche itself, to where the Station’s inhabitants have also been called.

But in a place where the void of space stands in not only for itself, but the void of Good itself, there are lights in the darkness. Father James is one of those. At one point Marcus seeks out the chapel, to go to Mass, and Father James reluctantly lets him in. He has already seen the things Marcus is only beginning to suspect. And the priest’s reappearance later in the story is a moment of incensepunk glory.

Yuval’s writing is once again on prime display in this story. His pacing is tight, his descriptive language masterful, his ability to pull the reader in and make you feel what Marcus is going through impeccable. Touches such as how the reader learns the name of the sinisterly inhuman AI is an utterly masterful reveal by Kordov.

Needless to say, I was blown away by The Shadow Over Psyche Station, finishing it in less than 36 hours. (Hey, I had to sleep and work some where in there.) If cosmic horror and incensepunk are in your wheelhouse, you should definitely pick this one up. If those genres are not your bag, give it a chance anyway. Like me, you may find yourself appreciating it for the incredible prose it contains.

5/5 phins
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The saying is that cats have nine lives. I feel the amount of life iterations Court Gentry has gone through over the course of the Gray Man series exceeds the nine lives of cats, and would wreck lesser men. Yet Mark Greaney continues to find ways to keep Court and the other characters fresh as they face new adventures and new adversaries.

The Hard Line is no different, as The Gray Man and company launch a new off-the-books covert operation at the behest of the CIA’s current Deputy Director of Operations, a 100% deniable outfit he can point at problems the US would rather not have its fingers on. And also because they are the only people the DDO can currently trust, since the US intelligence community has a leak.

If there’s anything I love in an espionage thriller, it’s screwing over the Russians or the Chinese, and rooting out traitors. And if you can do both, well, it’s just double the pleasure, double the fun.

As Court’s first mission under the new venture meets with unexpected resistance, Zack is still recovering from his injuries from the previous novel’s foray in to Russia, and Zoya is unavailable recovering from her time in the gulag, meaning the new venture is hard-pressed for results from the get-go. Along the way, a personal connection to Zack’s past raises the stakes to a degree no one saw coming.

Throughout, Greaney continues to defy formulaic character exposés and plots that plague some thriller series. Zack’s continued development from where he started fifteen books ago has been something of a delight. I thought Mark’s last novel, Midnight Black, was incredible, and would be hard to beat, but The Hard Line may very well be one his best novels ever. Definitely recommended! 📚

5/5 phins
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Bookshop: hardcover, ebook