A true breach

 I had some expectations to The Breach by Patrick Lee and the entire trilogy of novels. The blurb, the back-cover text promised something more than the usual boring stuff we are served from establishment publishers. Usually, that promise isn’t fulfilled, but in this case, it was.
  The protagonist Travis Chase doesn’t just stumble upon an impossible scene, but his very destiny. He’s dragged reluctantly into deep secret clandestine government operations he can hardly believe. It takes even more unbelievable turns from that point.
  He has a somewhat detached approach to it all at first, but the more he discovers of the startling truth, the more personal and familiar and closer to home all of it becomes.
  What is The Breach? That question seems impossible to answer, for anyone involved, but eventually, as knowledge breeds the above-mentioned familiarity, and the truth is revealed, it becomes both far easier and far more difficult.
  This is a mystery, where layer upon layer is revealed and I love those. We are served clues that are often misdirection and distractions. Chase realizes that he can’t trust anyone, not the people he sees as friends and close confidantes, not even himself.
  This is undoubtedly a fresh breath of a story, clearly ambiguous and meant to be. There is great progression, and the story is believable within its own context, carefully crafted to slowly reveal the beyond shocking truth.

  One minor beef: I feel that the ending of the third book should have been told through action and not through the protagonist’s thoughts.

  This review is also about the novels Ghost Country and Deep Sky.

The scary depths within us all

  This is my review of Shadows by Shaun Hutson. Hutson was a great, underestimated author during his lifetime. It pleases me to honor him now.

  He wrote many fairly good novels, but this is his best. This one is great!

  You know early on that this isn’t a storybook, a run of the mill tale. It’s too cruel, too real life for that. The characters aren’t exactly model citizens or saints in any way. I see it pretty much as a hard core, black metal novel without audible music. It offers a hard, uncompromising look at modern mankind, giving no quarter.

  Against a backdrop of the celebrities’ paranormal scene, we’re drawn into a dark and sinister stage. Hutson pulls no punches when describing either that or a society plagued by corrupt politicians and officials. One scene of the book, where a politician goes completely overboard with his distaste for his constituents is particularly memorable. Hutson excels in gallows humor, not only in his writing of dark tales, a feature I certainly appreciate.

  In a very clever manner we never see the entire picture, everything happening until almost at the end. Several people we might suspect of being the villain are revealed to be just unsympathetic and not the true instigator of the ongoing and deepening horror. We keep guessing until the shocking end and are left hanging even then.

  Hutson, at his best is an entire genre on his own, as every author should be.