Nobody's Hero - M W Craven

 A series of seemingly unrelated murders prompts a safe to opened on the CIA compound in Virginia.  Inside the safe is a list: the Acacia Avenue Protocol.   The list draws Ben Koenig back into action.   First, because his name is on the list, and second, because he is the last law enforcement officer to have had contact with the woman who shot two Romanians dead at Speakers' Corner in Hyde Park and then kidnapped another woman whose name is also on the list.

But first Koenig has to be found and detained.   This is attempted by a group of corrupt NYPD detectives known as the East Coast Sweeney, who are really after the $5 million bounty posted by the Russian Mafia (see my review of Fearless, posted on this blog about a month ago).   It does not end well for the officers.   But Koenig is freed by his old sparring partner Jen Dtaper and a new intelligence chief called Andrew Smerconish.   Koenig and Draper are given endless resources and, more importantly, carte blanche to catch whoever is doing the murders.

Of course, things turn out to be more complicated than that.   There are two assassins, the wonderfully named Stillwell Hobbs and his adopted daughter Harper Nash.   But there is a level of psychopaths above them, the commissioning body, which is fronted by a super psycho called Jakob Tas, who is personally running an importation project which will plunge America into chaos.

As regular visitors will know, I was blown away with Fearless and the brilliance and depth which a British writer brings to a classic American genre.   Nobody's Hero is even better - more tightly written and with a larger cast of fascinating characters.   Nothing, absolutely nothing, is as it seems.   And the revelation with which it ends is a total zinger!

Fearless - M V Craven

 I discovered Mike Craven in Maxim Jakubowski's Birds, Strangers, Psychos anthology.   That was a short story in his Poe and Tilly series.   I looked in my local library and found this, the first novel in his US-set Ben Koenig series.

Koenig is a specially trained US marshal who went off the grid when a Russian mobster put a $5m bounty on his head for killing his son in a raid.   Six years later Koenig is tracked down by his former boss, Director of Marshals' Service, Mitch Burridge.   Someone has abducted Mitch's daughter; Mitch wants Koenig to track whoever it is down, recover young Martha, and wreak massive violence on the perps.   Both men know that the chances of Martha being alive are remote.

Mitch wants Koenig for the job not only for his special training.   The reason Koenig was chosen for special training is that he has Urbach-Wiethe disease: he literally cannot feel fear.

The first thing that impressed me was the depth of the backstory Craven has created.  I assumed there had been an earlier novel in which all this happened.   Oh no - this is the first, the place we start from.   And there's tons more about training, techniques, tactics, all of which is seamlessly introduced into the story which clips along at a genuinely thrilling pace.   In part, Craven is able to maintain the pace for over four hundred pages because he writes in short, sharp chapters, 127 of them.   There are many chapters where Koenig is simply travelling or observing, ideal opportunities to slip in some information and thus avoid the boredom of what the hero is actually doing.

The plotting is absolutely superb.   Where Craven got the idea for what is actually happening is beyond me.   I thought I was a dedicated reader of the small print and out-of-the-way news.   Not compared to Mike Craven I'm not.

Koenig is a great character.   He doesn't have the customary baggage - he doesn't have an ex-wife or girlfriend tp protect, he doesn't have a drink or drug problem, he just has the rare but genuine condition that makes him unique.   He knows all about his condition and he is well aware of the effect it has on his enemies.

I am hooked.   The next Koenig novel, published in late 2024, is Nobody's Hero.   I'm definitely reading that.   There remains the Poe/Tilly series, set in Cumbria, which I still want to try.   And a third series, also set in Cumbria, featuring the nicely-named Avison Fluke.   Plus a 'darkly funny' standalone, due out next year, called 101 Ways to Die in New York.  Yep, count me in.