Soft Target

It wasn't until I was well into SOFT TARGET that I realized it's apparently the second in the Dan Shepherd series. The third installment, COLD KILL, I'd read some months ago - see my review "How hardball do we play it" dated 6/29/06 - and the first, HARD LANDING, awaits on my unread shelf. I wish I'd read them in order, but who was to know? As I recall, even the Hardy Boys mysteries of my youth were sequentially numbered on the jacket. Ex-SAS trooper Dan Shepherd is now a Detective Constable with London's Metropolitan Police seconded to a special hush-hush undercover unit tasked with missions otherwise impossible. In SOFT TARGET, the marks are a businessman and a crime lord's wife, each soliciting the murder of his partner and her husband respectively, where Dan plays killer-for-hire Tony Nelson, and a corrupt cop in the Met's elite armed response unit, which Dan joins as Stuart Marsden, that tackles armed pizza shop bandits, a gang of roving teenage thugs on the Tube, and, ultimately, Moslem suicide bombers. On his bedside table, Dan/Tony/Stu has a cell phone for each identity. Kathy Gift is the shrink assigned by Dan's boss to make sure that Shepherd, who recently lost his wife in a road accident, isn't suffering debilitating stress. Gee, why would one think that? I gather that SOFT TARGET and HARD LANDING - the latter I have yet to read, you recall - serve as the character development bit in the evolution of author Stephen Leather's hero, whose ultimate mission in his fictional life is to foil Arab terrorists. In SOFT TARGET, there's fleeting reference to a mysterious Saudi, who travels the world on a British passport recruiting and arming suicide bombers, and who plays a major roll in COLD KILL. I'm giving SOFT TARGET four stars not because it falls short as a thriller, but simply because it's not quite as riveting as COLD KILL, to which I gave five stars. (This reviewing gig is subjective and relative, after all.) I'm also somewhat impatient with the text space devoted to Dan's well-meaning but too often shoddy performance as a single Dad to his now motherless son, Liam. I gather Leather included this to show Dan as a regular bloke with a warm, fuzzy side to attract female readers, but the subplot never seems to go anywhere (and doesn't in COLD KILL, either). Less Liam and more Gift would've been more interesting. Stephen tells me that there's to be a fourth Shepherd novel (in which, presumably, Dan's confrontation with Islamic nutters escalates). I'm actually looking forward to this book more than I am the first in the series because by that time the Shepherd character will have evolved to literary maturity.

This was the first time I sampled the adventures of British undercover cop Dan "Spider" Shepherd, and I quite enjoyed it. What's great is that the book delivers the kind of tough thrills promised on the cover and in the book's description, but also pleasantly surprises the reader with sensitively-written scenes involving Dan and his home life. Shepherd is a new widower as the book opens (presumably as a result of events chronicled in past volumes), and he has to balance his official duties with raising his young son. The quieter scenes, however, don't in any way water down the action plot. In fact author Stephen Leather seems to go out of his way here to give the reader lots of separate little adventures for Shepherd to handle, which results in many interesting scenarios. For example, it's fun to watch Shepherd juggling all his various undercover identities in his head, and making sure he always answers the correct cell phone (he has several) with the correct "personality". "Soft Target" delivers action, thrills, colorful antagonists, intelligent commentary on our times, nicely-drawn characters, and a setting- London and its environs- not seen in every other thriller. I'm looking forward to catching up on other titles in this series.

Stephen Leather just gets better and better. His Dan 'Spider' Shepherd hero is as good as Mike Cramer, the SAS guy he killed off in The Double Tap. Hopefully Shepherd will stay the course. In Soft Target, Leather predicted the bombings on the London Underground. In Cold Kill, he has terrorists attacking the Eurostar cross-Channel train. Only Shepherd can save the day! A fast-paced read that I couldn't put down.

Just as some books are rather scathingly called "chick lit", this is the very opposite, a boy's own adventure, culminating in the story of the London terrorist bombings of recent times. Dan Sheperd is an undercover cop who is sent into all kinds of secret assignments. A former SAS member who is still coming to terms with the loss of his wife in a car accident, he is slotted into a group of SO19 police officers who handle special situation problems, but who are suspected of having a few loose cannons among their members. Dan is still operating as a so called hit man, in an effort to expose a big time mobster, whose wife conveniently wants him dead and has hired Dan in his role as hit man, to do the job. The SO19 cops who have gone bad, accept Dan into their ranks and plan their next coup against drug dealers, hoping to make some big money. The author has followed the real plot of the Muslim extremists in their plan to blow up the underground railway system in London and has included lots of technical details about the weaponry of both the police, the terrorists and their training programs. It's a good, fast read, even though it will probably appeal more to the boys.