Shadow Woman by Thomas Perry

 

(hb; 1997: third book in the Jane Whitefield series)

From the inside flap

“Jane Whitefield is a ‘guide’—she leads desperate people away from danger into safe places and gives them new identities. In Shadow Woman, Jane designs a harrowing escape for Pete Hatcher, a Las Vegas casino executive whose suspicious employers are about to kill him. Once her client is safe, Jane makes herself vanish and retires from her dangerous profession to marry the man she loves. But the risky business she left behind returns with terrible urgency on the night she receives Pete Hatcher’s call for help. A man and a woman who can only be an assassination team have found his hiding place, and Jane must beat the killers to their prey. She needs all the courage, fortitude, and intelligence of her Native American heritage to keep Hatcher alive. And this time, the killers know she’s coming.”

 

Review

Like the preceding Whitefield novel, Dance for the Dead, Shadow Woman is light on Indian practicality and wisdom tales and focuses on the action, immediate storyline, and characters—and what a doozy some of the characters are! Linda Thompson and Earl Bliss, within the context of the Whitefield novels, might just be the most hair-raising and perverse psychosexual skip tracers/murderers Jane has faced. Not only that, Pete Seaver, head of security and occasional killer for incorporated Las Vegas mobsters (Pleasure, Inc.) is beginning to have doubts about his Las Vegas employers and Thompson and Bliss, and has set out to get their prey, Hatcher and, if necessary, Whitefield.

For the most part, Shadow is an excellent, intense read, with a darkly funny ending. It deftly avoids (possibly) melodramatic situations between Jane and her laid-back fiancé, Carey McKinnon, who is—for this reader, anyway—so naïve and trusting he borders on people-stupid/unrealistic. Despite this relatively character nit, Shadow works as an above-average novel, one worth owning. Followed by The Face Changers.

The Killer Elite by Robert Rostand

 

(pb; 1973)

From the back cover 

“The day of the assassins.

“There were three of them, the best in the business. All were in England now, three free-lance professional assassins hired by the same power, three specialists in sudden death closing in one the same target.

“Just one man stood between them and the success of their murderous mission. A man with past failure to atone for; a blood to settle. A man whose almost insane pride would prefer death to another defeat. A man named [Michael] Locken, with nothing left to lose and no one left to trust as the faced the killer elite.”

 

Review

Killer is a tautly written, effectively character sketched action novel with a lot of character-based twists, some of them likely familiar to genre-knowledgeable readers, but many of them still-effective and masterful. This is a great action-genre read, one worth seeking out.

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Two film versions resulted from this Rostand novel.

The PG-rated first version, The Killer Elite, was directed by Sam Peckinpah. It was released stateside on December 19, 1975. Killer‘s screenplay was penned by Marc Norman, Stirling Siliphant, and Robert Syd Hopkins.

James Caan played Mike Locken. Robert Duvall played George Hansen. Arthur Hill played Cap Collis. Bo Hopkins played Jerome Miller. Mako played Yuen Chung.

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The second version, Killer Elite, was released stateside on September 23, 2011. Gary McKendry directed it, from Matt Shering and Ranulph Fiennes’s screenplay.

Jason Statham played Danny [cinematic stand-in for Mike Locken]. Clive Owen played Spike. Robert DeNiro played Hunter. Adewale Akinnouye-Agbaje played Agent. Dominic Purcell played Davies.  

Shibuya Goldfish (books 1—11) by Hiroumi Aoi

 

(pb; 2017; eleven-book manga series)

From the back cover

“High schooler Hajime Tuskiyoda went to Shibuya that day hoping only to find inspiration for his next film. He never expected to find himself smack-dab in the middle of a real-life horror movie. Without warning, schools of massive goldfish descend upon the crowded streets, and the mystified onlookers’ confusion quickly turns to terror as the fish begin to feed. From their tentative shelter, Hajime and a handful of survivors await a rescue that seems more and more unlikely as the days and hours tick by. Meanwhile, all around them, the bloody feeding frenzy begins.”

 

Review

This fast-paced, sometimes melodramatic, action-oriented, folklore-based horror-fantasy manga about bizarre, oversized, man-eating goldfishes is an above-average read for the genre (even with its occasional upskirt/low-skirt/panty shots, to further keep teenage boys’ attention), one worth reading. The characters are mostly fun and fully explored (for manga), the artwork is wow-worthy, and the twists are solid as is the ending. Worth checking out, this.