Hitman’s Delight

Here is my dilemma: I enjoy a good action/adventure yarn as much as the next person, but I have a hard time with most of the books out there. This is because a) the writer lacks the wordplay to keep me interested, or b) the story is as inauthentic as on of the TV show episodes where they substitute the Southern California desert for a battlefield in Iraq (do they think we won’t notice). I can count the authors of pop fiction that I like on one hand:Thumb: Elmore LeonardIndex finger: James Ellroy (sometimes). Other times, Alex Garland if he would ever get off his fat British ass and write another decent book like the Tesseract.Middle Finger (not meant to be derogotory): John BurdettRing Finger: John Le CarrePinky: Barry EislerEisler’s books are not spectacular, but they do have more than enough of both authenticity and craft. His hero, a violent but likable hitman named John Rain, lives his trade 24/7. Eisler includes details about such things as counter surveillance and judo techniques used to snap someone’s neck. Granted, I know nothing about either of those things, but I do know when an author got their information from wikipedia instead of from firsthand knowledge. Eisler had a career with the CIA, though I doubt there was overly much neck snapping involved. Whatever his experience, he is able to coolly describe the action and give the reader an uncommon sense of authenticity. I think this is because he is able to make the reader feel that they are inside Rain’s mind as he is going about his brutal business. It is actually kind of dark, with Rain more of a likable anti-hero than a good guy. These details are given a kind of human aspect because Eisler includes very human details in every scene. Rain notices things that everyone would notice; the taste of a coffee, the dreary feeling of a rainy day, the feeling of waking up in the middle of the night worrying about something. The small moments like this is when Eisler actually makes it seem like we are in Rain’s world, because, aside from the killing and spy-craft, he is no different from us.