Michael Slade (currently the father/daughter writing team of Jay and Rebecca Clarke) is one of the most dependable of thriller writers. Jay is a trial lawyer who specializes in cases involving the criminally insane, and what he doesn’t know about the way these lads and lasses think could be balanced on the point of a butcher knife. This has produced, in the 11 novels previous to KAMIKAZE, some of the most brutal and gut-wrenching moments of violence since Mary Kelly’s overnighter with Saucy Jack.
Those first 11 books are the good news. Number 12 is less so.
The Hett family has gathered in Vancouver. Daughter Jackie is a Mountie assigned to the Special X Squad. This is the group that deals with foreign threats and serial killers. Her dad is a retired Marine colonel; her grandfather flew in the Enola Gay when it dropped its load on Hiroshima. Grandfather Red still hates the old enemy.
Also in Vancouver at this time is another octogenarian survivor of WWII, a Japanese named Tokuda who blames his horrible facial scars on the Americans, and especially those who delivered the bomb labeled Little Boy. To round out this rogue’s gallery, we also have a middle-aged woman whose mother was a nurse in Hong Kong when the Japanese invaded, and who was raped repeatedly by, you guessed it, Tokuda.
Is all this coincidental to the point of absurdity? You bet your bushido it is, and I haven’t told you about all of it.
The book is a total vengeance-a-palooza in which A hates B, B hates A, C hates B, and while A and C don’t know each other, they probably wouldn’t get along if they did. There isn’t a whole lot of plot to it all beyond the “this time it’s personal” shtick. Slade is always good at historical research, and this time you’ll have the chance to learn more about Japanese war crimes than you ever thought you’d want to. Every time we think that Slade couldn’t be finding parallels between the total horror that was the war in the Pacific and America’s current adventure in Iraq, we are reminded that sneak attacks incinerating civilians are acts of terrorism.
I suspect that Slade’s anger about current world affairs has played hell with his usual quasi-splatterpunk approach to thriller writing, making this novel more personal but less well-thought-out, and much less edge-of-your-seaty. As always, the book is compulsively readable and you’ll zip through it like a hot chainsaw through butter, but you’ll look in vain for those patented moments of Grand Guignol that make Slade, Slade.
But that’s okay, just this once, from a writer who has ruined so many peaceful nights for me. Every writer needs to get things off his chest once in a while. –Doug Bentin
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