At Hell's Gate

Excellent, straight-ahead story. Superb writing and dialog. The coverage and flavor of NYC is excellent. Voort is a real person. I seriously liked this. I rate 8 to 10 books in this genre each month. I rate it based on a 0-5 point scale. This book rated Characters: 4.00. Realism: 4.25. Description: 4.00. Ah Ha: 2.50. The Read: 4.25. Overall, the book ranked 27 out of 361 books.

Wow! Ethan Black's newest Voort thriller moves along at a breakneck pace, putting our hero through one of the most harrowing experiences in literature, an experience more discomfiting than the dental torture scenes in Marathon Man, and equally as hard to read as the torture scenes in Red Dragon and Silence of the Lambs. Conrad Voort is broken down by the experience and must decide to succumb to the terror, or fight back. The final 150 pages of this book are taut with suspense and action, and the interfamilial tension between Voorts, Voort and his partner, and Voort and Camilla add an emotional element that makes the suspense more real. This was an excellent book, and I highly recommend it.

See story summary above. An average effort by Ethan Black this time around. Though it has action as well as an emotional edge, this isn't the Conrad Voort of old (as one reviewer mentioned). It is a good story and it will keep you intrigued, so I would still recommend it for Ethan Black fans.

Ethan Black's previous Conrad Voort novels have been expertly written and near perfect. In AT HELL'S GATE, Black loses some of the impetus he established in his earlier works. Conrad is back, engaged to Camilla Ryan, and finds himself in a murder investigation that has far reaching implications. He and Camilla discover a corpse while kayaking, and later find that the victim is a cab driver. This leads to the cabbie's interest in treasure hunting, looking for a sunken treasure believed to be in the river. Once Voort latches on to the probable bad guy, he is victimized by a sadistic henchman---his masculinity takes a big bruise, and his damaged psyche forces him into the role of a vigilante, without including his beloved in what's going on. Black writes good dialogue, and he sets some tense scenarios, but Voort loses some of his charm in this one. In his other novels, Voort has been very moralistic, and a deep believer in his faith and his family. His actions in this one don't seem to coincide with what we've learned about him up to this point. I hope Black does better in his next Voort offering and lets Camilla and Voort go ahead and tie the knot, or separate them permanently.

When the pilgrims came over on the Mayflower, the Voorts were not far behind. Ever since their arrival in the new world, the Voorts were loyal to their country. Wealthy New York police officer Conrad Voort heads the clan. He is engaged to the woman he love and is looking forward to his marriage only four months away. One day while Voort and Camilla are kayaking near Hell's Gate, they find a dead man and bring him to shore. Almost immediately, Voort learns that the man was interested in the ship the Hussar that went down in New York waters during the Revolutionary War supposedly carrying a lot of gold. That clue leads him to the murder of two men who sailed a tugboat. That information causes three men to assault and almost rape Voort. They threaten to harm him and his loved ones if he does not leave the country. Humiliated, and afraid for his fiancée and his family he does what they want but it burns his soul to comply. He returns to New York in secret intending to bring down the men who did this to him knowing he battles treasure-hunting killers who are not seeking gold. This police procedural is one of the most heart wrenching crime thrillers anyone will ever read. The hero's reaction to his near rape and its' aftermath will make readers feel for him and like Voort want vengeance. This leads the audience to accept some of the questionable actions he takes. He is full of pride and in this case, it is a big fault because he cannot tell Camilla what happened to him and she is left feeling alone and abandoned. Ethan Black knows how to pull emotions out of his audience and we love him for it. Harriet Klausner