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Destroyed, The (2014)

by Brett Battles(Favorite Author)

4.13 of 5 Votes: 4

ISBN

1491581891 (ISBN13: 9781491581896)

languge

English

genre

Mystery & Thriller

publisher

Brilliance Audio

series

Jonathan Quinn

review 1: Battles is very gifted at constructing clever and compelling plot lines. But they have to be supported by believable characters, and hopefully expressed in prose that at the very least does not get in the way of the read. I loved the first books in the Quinn series -- The Cleaner and The Deceived -- but I sure did not love this one. Quinn comes out of moral-crisis retirement to join Nate in finding Mila Voss, a courier who was near and dear to a friend who died helping Quinn. So the task is to find Mila and save her. Yet she doesn't trust anyone and doesn't want to be saved; she has her own quest to fulfill. Unfortunately, this did not make her likable, or even someone I identified with or felt sympathy for: an essential element in this sort of story. I wish he'd gotten in... moreto her head a bit more to bolster her motivation and make us care more. But my biggest problem with this novel was the writing itself. It was so sloppy that it left me shaking my head every few minutes. Word substitutions of the kind found in auto-guess spellcheckers were rampant. (I did read it on a Kindle, so they may not all have been the author's fault. Or perhaps he dictated the book using transcription software.) But the bad writing goes much further than sloppy sentence construction. Rather than giving us the insider details about how to pull off an op, we get lines like this, from Ch. 38: "The first thing they did was jam the maintenance closet door closed in a way only they would know how to easily open again." Okay, and how exactly did they manage that? I'd like to know. It's not like slapping a new password on a computer, or a padlock on a door. It's just plain laziness or lack of imagination. There's far too much of this sort of construction, and although the story moves, it lacks the structure and the intricacy I look for in an international thriller of this sort. Lastly, it strains belief that Nate, with his artificial leg below the knee, could run so fast as to overtake Mila, and could leap from building to building. To me, not an insignificant detail. I noted that Battles now self-publishes on CreateSpace/ Amazon, and I suspect that his earlier books were edited professionally, while this one is not. If so, big loss! But it could have been written by a 14 year-old. I would have crossed Battles off my to-read list permanently, except that I'd already purchased the next volume in the Quinn series, which turned out to be better. Not amazing, but better. See my review.
review 2: In my last review of a Brett Battles novel (“The Collected,” published in October of 2012, and the seventh and penultimate [so far] entry in this series), I noted that Jonathan Quinn, the protagonist whose job it is to discreetly clean up crime scenes, remove bodies and get rid of nasty, incriminating stuff like blood, and his protégé, Nate, had become colleagues, rather than mentor and apprentice. In this, the sixth Quinn book, the reader finds out how that came about.The tale opens in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, when a man keeps an appointment scheduled through an enigmatic e-mail from what is apparently a non-existent address. A fateful meeting it is, as the man soon falls [jumps? is pushed?] to his death just as he is about to keep his appointment with one Mila Voss, the person who is central to the fascinating plot fashioned here. [Note that this occurs on page 21 of the book, so no spoiler here.] When security cameras show a disguised but recognizable Mila rushing to the spot where the body landed, a furor is raised in “the secret world”: The woman was supposed to have been killed six years ago, and Quinn was the one tasked with disposing of the body, which he duly reported he had done. Conspiracies, corruption in high places, powerful men who will stop at nothing to achieve their goals, all combine to serve up another terrific thriller.In addition to Tanzania, the story takes the reader to Stockholm, Sweden; Lucerne, Switzerland; London; Rome; Las Vegas; San Francisco; Atlanta, Georgia; Virginia; and, early on, to Bangkok, where Quinn took refuge nearly nine months prior following the events in the prior series entry. That self-banishment gave rise to Nate becoming “a full-fledged cleaner, running Quinn’s business on his own.” As Quinn notes when Nate succeeds in tracking him down, “There was something older about Nate, his edges sharper and more defined. There was a confidence, too. While Nate undoubtedly had more to learn, he was now a professional who could stand on his own.”Those who have not yet read the subsequent series entry, “The Collected,” should waste no time correcting that situation. Both of these are wonderful, suspense-filled reads, and are highly recommended. less

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