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Severance Kill (2012)

by Tim Stevens(Favorite Author)

3.65 of 5 Votes: 5

languge

English

genre

Mystery & Thriller

publisher

Smashwords Edition

review 1: This almost turned into another 'stopped reading' review, except that I wanted to know what happened to Martin Calvary, the protagonist. So I ignored my many reasons to delete this book from my Kindle and struggled through the formatting errors that cropped up in the last quarter of the book. Should I have? Perhaps not, but I was curious to see if Stevens had a twist at the end that would be worth it. There was something that should've been a twist, except that it didn't surprise me in the slightest. Maybe less discerning readers will be surprised by the ending, I don't know.So, the formatting errors... I actually contacted the author and he wrote me a very nice PM telling me that he had a giveaway through Bookbub with some 30,000 downloads, with all the Kindle versions co... morentaining the formatting errors, but not the ePubs. I can understand that through some mistake an older file containing proofreading notes and formatting errors ends up in an e-book. So, if you have one of these screwed up Severance Kill e-books, maybe you can get a new corrected file through Manage my Kindle. Or you can just ignore the typos, missing quotes and strike-through sentences. And overlook the awkward prose when a sick woman running up the steps is ‘ignoring the complaints from her unaccustomed knees’ and operatives being ‘linked up telephonically’.However, I pointed out that there were many more mistakes unrelated to the formatting issue. Mr. Stevens didn’t show any interest in my feedback, so I’ll just put them in my review.On the whole, the book was well-written. I had some trouble with the start of the book, where Calvary is getting his ass kicked out of a fourth-floor apartment, manages to keep from falling to his death, and gets back into the apartment to finish the target. The target, who first puts up a fight and almost finishes Calvary, suddenly retreats into his apartment, where the target suddenly changes into a weakling.Calvary crouches in front of the sitting target, lays a hand on either side of the man’s face and kills him with a crack… So what did Calvary do? Break his neck? Let’s just say, don’t believe the action movies you’ve seen about how easy it is to break someone’s neck. The author is a doctor with the National Health Service, so he might be hesitant to give an exact blow-by-blow on how to break someone’s neck, but to break someone’s neck while crouched in front of him and holding his ears is quite a challenge. After that, Calvary gets blackmailed into doing a last job in Prague, where he reminisces about his past kills. And I almost put the book down. Why? Because Calvary reminisces about electrocuting a target in his bathtub. By throwing a battery-operated transistor radio into the bath. The death of the target is horrifying. “Crackles and screams, churning mix of water and blood and effluent, like a shark’s attack” and the victim dies with a rictus of agony and a hand clawing the air.Impressive, if it wasn’t that a battery-operated transistor radio tossed in a bathtub will not have a sufficiently high charge to electrocute a human being. I could start a whole explanation about the milliamps used by transistor radio and how many transistor radios would have to be submerged in your bath to tickle your heart into the high frequency fatal fluttering of a heart attack, but even then the victim will not flail about like they are chewing on a high voltage wire. And while I can understand someone emptying their bowels when they are electrocuted, how exactly does all that blood get in the water? And what makes the water churn? Not the two 9V batteries in the transistor radio, I can tell you.If killing someone by tossing a battery-operated transistor radio into their baths would work, lots of disgruntled housewives would be buying battery-operated transistor radios…With my bullshit radar now on full alert I read on.Calvary relieves someone of his semi-automatic pistol and thumbs the safety before he slips it in his pocket. When he takes the pistol from his pocket a few pages later and hands it to someone, the pistol turns out to be a Glock 17. And Glocks have not safety to be thumbed. The safety of the Glock is a small ‘second trigger’ inside the trigger.Moments later Calvary takes ‘the Browning’ because ‘the Browning has to be cocked before every shot and the Glock chambered a new round automatically, making it easier for a novice to use’. The Browning, like the Glock, is a semi-automatic pistol. You might have to pull the slide to chamber the first round, but after that the blowback action of the slide will chamber a new round from the spring-loaded magazine in the grip.The last part of the story featured strike through sentences, misspelled words like ’trial’ for ‘trail’, omitted words like ‘[character name] phone went’, double words like ‘ahead he fancied saw the car park’ [maybe so you can choose which verb you think is most appropriate?] and quotes missing so you have to guess what is narrative and what is dialogue. Sometimes the Third Person Limited perspective featured intrusions of First Person, often right in the middle of action scenes, ‘one of her feet catching him on the cheekbone. It wasn’t enough to put me off. Calvary began to crawl…’ and so on. All that could be overlooked if the characters didn’t start doing improbable things, like Calvary on the run renting a car with cash but expressing no worries about having to show his driving license because ‘he [protagonist] doubted [antagonists] would be monitoring every car rental place in the city’. Really? Their spy craft must be worse than mine, because—despite not being a professional spy—I would definitely monitor every means of (public) transport in a hundred mile radius if I were looking for a spy on the run. But then, Calvary could be right about the antagonists lack of tracking skills. The scene shifts to the antagonists who are fretting because one of their operatives has been incommunicado for almost a day. Finally the leader has a brilliant idea and goes to the communications officer, where the leader asks an underling ‘can you get a GPS trace on [missing operative’s] phone?’ The comm officer, who has been twiddling her thumbs apparently, answers affirmatively and set to work. Again: seriously? These antagonists are supposed to be veteran’ intelligence’ officers, and they wait for hours before they decide to put a trace on their missing team member?With my suspension of disbelief blown beyond repair I finished the book.Wasted potential. 2/5 stars. Only recommended if your suspension of disbelief is made out of sturdier material than mine…
review 2: Masterful nonstop action. . .This novel, about an assassin chasing quarry, starts with action that continues straight through to the end. Reading it is like watching a destruction derby, with good guys and bad guys as moving parts. The author lays on movement, action and violence, providing plenty of graphic bloody details, offering an expert's lesson in anatomy. Action hurtles forward at breakneck speed, abetted by frequent changes in viewpoint from hunter to hunted during the numerous chases.In the first few chapters, I experienced some confusion sorting out the characters and their relationships. It soon became clear that the novel involves four separate groups of people with exotic names (e.g.,Yaroslavovna, Tamarkin, Oleg, Arkady, Blazek, Grechko) and even a Welshman named Dafyydd Llewellyn. For a while I considered the possibility the names were an inside joke I didn't get. I was relieved to find that, after I read on, everything fell into place.The main character is Martin (AKA Calvary) who works for an ultra-secret branch of British Intelligence service (codename Chapel). He was hired from the Army after proving his talents during combat. He knows his handler but little else about Chapel. Martin is intelligent, skilled with weapons, willing to risk his life to serve his country. He has killed several men and is close to burnout, but Chapel will not release him until he performs one more job. The target is a former British diplomat named Gaines, once a double agent for the Russians.The action starts. In a nutshell's nutshell, it goes something like this: Martin locates Gaines, pursues him, Russians join the chase and interfere, organized crime figures join the chase and interfere, underground activists join the fray on Martin's side, and the story works its way to a conclusion, with a twist at the end, and then another twist. What I left out in the framework just given is the violent action at each intersection of parties, which includes car chases, shootouts, foot chases, stabbings, scuffles, torture, grenade launching, and the like.Steven's writing is superb, intelligent and filled with energy. The entire enterprise is tight and well-edited, without a wasted word. Overall, an impressive book. Highly recommended. less

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