Hungry Ghost

The milieu of HUNGARY GHOST is Hong Kong during the Festival of the Hungary Ghosts, during which time souls of the dead are released from Hell and must be ritually propitiated before they can wreak havoc among the living. Sort of like Halloween without the candy. Here, the transfer of the Crown Colony to Red China is only a few years away. A top executive in the London HQ of the Secret Intelligence Service unilaterally reactivates Geoff Howells, a former MI6 assassin previously forced into retirement after he began enjoying his work just a little too much. Geoff's mission - to kill Simon Ng, the head of a powerful Hong Kong triad, who's understood to be threatening the Beijing mandarins with the blowing of bloody big hole in the containment dome of a nuclear reactor located six miles upwind of the colony unless Hong Kong's handover is delayed fifty years, an unacceptable scenario to the Brits, who just want to exit gracefully ASAP. To bring Simon out from behind his protective walls and bodyguards, Howells kidnaps Sophie, Ng's daughter by his beautiful English wife, Jill. The basic elements of HUNGRY GHOST promise a lean and mean thriller. While it proves to be gratifyingly mean, it's less of the former through the introduction of a superfluity of characters: Pat Dugan, a Senior Inspector in the Commercial Crime Unit of the Hong Kong Police Department as well as Jill's brother, Simon Ng's father and brother, two CIA operatives, one very cute female assassin working for the People's Republic, and a golden-hearted bar girl named Amy. While all these extra players add complexity and interest, I suggest the novel would have been even better had it come down to a contest between Jill and/or Sophie and Geoff without all the other distractions. Indeed, author Stephen Leather has created strong-willed heroines to excellent effect in two other of his potboilers, THE BOMBMAKER and THE STRETCH, both of which transcend this volume in suspense and clever plotting and got 5 stars from me. Mind you, HUNGRY GHOST's 462 paper-backed pages provided better than average entertainment on a 4-hour rail ride from Bridgeport, CT to Baltimore, and a 5-hour flight from Baltimore to Los Angeles, when I wasn't otherwise dozing. And if, like me, you've been lucky enough to visit Hong Kong, this book summons up memories of that visually stunning city. But, it's not the author's best work among those I've read to date.