Afterburn

I found this book in a bargain book shop in Auckland, New Zealand and couldn't have enjoyed it any more. The end of the novel does a great job of both pulling together the characters and the plot but also plugging the holes in the story that I initially found unrealistic. The author does an impressive job of building together characters that are indeed multi-dimensional and believable. Few people are truly "good" or universally "bad" and Colin Harrison's main characters are both likable and realistic. The ending was neither dissapointing nor predictable.

Charlie Ravich is a very successful telecommunicaitons mogul in his late fifties, however he is racked with injuries he got during his time as a POW during the Vietnam war. On a trip to Hong Kong, where he is trying to get a factory built, he witnesses a murder and it winds up making him wealthy, very wealthy. But money won't buy you everything. Or will it. Charlie's son died from leukemia years ago, his wife is slipping away with Alzheimer's and Charlie is obsessed with his pending oblivion. He desperately wants someone to carry on his name. So he advertises for a woman to have his child. Christina Wells is a pretty young thing just out of the joint, where she spent four years. She's gone to Columbia University, so you know she's smart, but she dropped out to lead the life of a small time grifter. She'd been raped when she was a little girl and it haunts her. Well, maybe she's not so smart, because she spent the fours years behind bars, because she took the rap for her iron-pumping, former boyfriend, Rick Bocca, who somehow found out when she was getting out on a surprise release. It seems that somehow five million went missing from that job she went up for and he wants it back. This is a well written and well paced story with an ending which doesn't leave you wanting or feeling short-changed. The characters are a little over the top, but Mr. Harrison is such a honeydripper of a writer, who throws people and situations together so well, that we don't care, in fact instead, we revel in his character's excesses. This novel is film noir on the written page and is really, very, very good.

AFTERBURN is an intelligent, visceral, well-told literary thriller. Harrison ignores the convenient, overused plot devices found in many thrillers. His characters are drawn with unnerving clarity. Yes, the story is a little brutal, and certainly he spares no detail when painting sex scenes, but for readers who appreciate novels that don't pull punches, that shine a spotlight into the dark corners of our minds and lives, AFTERBURN is nearly perfect. Highly recommended.

As a (thus far) unpublished writer of thrillers myself, I found this book - my first by Colin Harrison - depressing...because it is just so damned well written. The sheer artistry and depth of Harrison's writing is compellingly good. So good, in fact, that, after reading "Afterburn" I almost felt like abandoning my own aspirations to professional writing. His style and prose transcend the thriller genre, rendering this book a novel in the classic sense. The characters are drawn into, rather than from, life, and it is difficult to resist momentarily identifying with most (not all!) of them and all their ignoble and nasty traits, as Harrison crafts this tale of greed, guts and intrigue. And a tense and gripping, if at times harrowing, tale it is; the best I have read for a long time. Disturbing, too, for its realism. I am a law enforcement veteran of nearly forty years; I have have been "on the streets" in two continents, and yet the clinical calousness of "Morris" in the way he tortures his subjects with surgical precision left me feeling queasy and, yes, a little unnerved. You see, I know such people really exist out there. In "Afterburn", Colin Harrison has captured a slice of underworld life in a literary jar. Read it!

Colin Harrison's Afterburn is quite simply one of the most powerful genre thrillers in quite some time. The largely negative reader reviews here bafffle me to some extent. I think the core of the problem many have with the book is that it is very raw and deals its characters and plot in a much more realistic fashion than that to which readers of the genre are accustomed. But for those who are willing to forego the standard issue thriller trappings, this book is a gut-wrenching tour-de-force.