cdm72's Full Review: Jeff Abbott - Collision: Library Edition
They tell writers the most important thing they can do, aside from write, is to read. Read everything. And that’s a rule I try to live by. While horror is my preferred genre, sometimes you have to step away from that and read something that, at first glance, might not look all that interesting. But it’s only by exposing ourselves to other areas of fiction that we can see what else there is to do with the work. So at my library, I grabbed a book from the Mystery section, a section I don’t believe I’ve ever even looked at, let alone read from. The first book on the shelf was Jeff Abbott’s COLLISION. I didn’t even read the synopsis till I got it in the car. It didn’t sound too bad, actually, although maybe a bit convoluted and confusing.
Ben Forsberg is a consultant to many large firms, namely one Hector Global, which provides security and military support to nations around the world. Ben has made a good deal of money from his work, but Sam Hector has made more. Then again, since Ben’s wife Emily was killed less than a week into their honeymoon, Ben hasn’t been of a mind to do much BUT work.
One day he comes home from a few days out of town and finds Homeland Security knocking on his door, suspecting Ben of murder. A businessman named Adam Reynolds has been killed by a sniper, and the sniper’s body was then found in the parking garage of a neighboring building, dead, with Ben Forsberg’s business card in his pocket.
Ben insists he knows nothing of anyone named Adam Reynolds, Nicky Lynch, or any murders, but when the Homeland Security officers learn of the amazing coincidence between the deaths of Adam and Ben’s wife Emily, not to mention the involvement of a sniper in both cases, they start to come down pretty hard on Ben. His business is threatened, his family, his life. He’ll never see the outside of a prison cell again.
He doesn’t know anything, he insists. But if that’s true, where have the new credit cards, the new cell numbers in Ben’s name come from? And why is there a message on Ben’s answering machine from Adam Reynolds, left there before his murder, confirming he and Ben’s meeting for the next day?
Things look like complete crap for Ben. He’s dragged to a newly constructed Homeland Security office where he’s questioned mercilessly, but just when things look like they can’t get any bleaker, in rushes Pilgrim, an ex-CIA agent, and current secret assassin for an inter-governmental agency known as The Cellar. He gives Ben the “Come with me if you want to live”, and they escape.
Truth is, however, Pilgrim wasn’t there to rescue Ben. Pilgrim’s boss, Teach, had been kidnapped and brought, he believed, to this location. The only reason Pilgrim gives Ben Forsberg the time of day is because he knows Ben’s innocent, and they’re both being set up. Because, as it happens, Pilgrim was the man who killed Nicky Lynch and left Ben’s business card behind. He had been told the Ben Forsberg identity was made up. But now he realizes something really big is afoot, and Pilgrim is going to find out what!
I didn’t go into COLLISION expecting to LOVE it, but I also knew from having read a couple “spy” novels in years past that, as long as the story is interesting and the writing clear and exciting, I’d enjoy it for what it was. Luckily Abbott’s story unraveled at just the right pace to keep me interesting, while his writing moved along at a good enough pace I never once found myself bored or considering dropping the novel for something better.
The way Ben and Pilgrim’s lives interconnected was, in the end, no big surprise—predictable in a couple of places, although I was holding out hope I would be wrong—but Abbott times his reveals just right so we DON’T know just what’s coming yet. In fact, even up through the last fourth of the book, I was still finding myself surprised by whatever new twist Abbott took. No, I wasn’t made into a Mystery convert, and I’m still not that big a fan of spy novels, but as a novel in its own right, with nothing to measure it against except other “good” or “bad” novels, COLLISION is definitely one of the good ones.
I had a moment in the beginning when I feared I may be in for a lot of technobabble and shop talk in terms of government agents and foreign policy and a lot of other stuff that doesn’t interest me in the least, but Abbott detoured around all that and just told a really interesting story about two very different, but well-developed characters. Ben was the focal character and, as expected, went through the biggest change. A man who began the novel as one who will stand up for himself when he needs to, wasn’t much of a fighter when it came to striking back, but over the course of events, his experiences with Pilgrim really brought out a whole new slew of characteristics Ben hadn’t known he possessed. And while Pilgrim was, for the most part, the stereotypical action hero who never misses and never seems to get hit—at least not fatally—Abbott gave him enough background and motivation to at least make him a sympathetic character, if not necessarily a believable one.
I won’t say COLLISION has turned me into a Jeff Abbott fan, I’m certainly not rushing out to pick up all of his other novels, but if he happens to be next in line on my library shelf the next time I go genre-hunting, at the very least I’ll know I’m in very capable hands. And that alone counts for a LOT.
A master of the action-packed thriller, the author of the international sensation Panic delivers a meaty, twisty, white-knuckle ride designed to prope...More at Buy.com
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