The Deceived

Three Brett Battles novels and three one sitting thrillers isn't bad at all! As a matter of fact, I turned off my telephone's ringer and ignored knocks at the door while reading this one. Indeed, the plots and the villians are rather James Bondian, but Jonathan Quinn isn't. He does get on the wrong track imperiling his apprentice Nate and girl friend Orlando more than once, but this isn't due as much to his flaws as to the flaws in the system. Like imagine playing chess if some of your pieces become your opponent's pieces, or some of you opponent's suddenly are yours. It would be rather complicated, no? You'll notice that I'm not giving away much of the plot here. Others have done that, and anyway, I feel the less you know what to expect from this novel, the better. I will warn you that this doesn't quite fall into the category of realistic spy fiction and if you don't find fun in rather grandiose and unlikely conspiracies, you just might not like the Jonathan Quinn books. As for me, I find them to be fantastic fun and give them my highest recommendation.

The Deceived had me at page one. I found it hard to put down. The writing is clear and direct. The action is fast and furious. The story has plenty of surprises and unexpected twists. The descriptions of the locations made me feel like I was there. l'm a picky reader, but this book totally hooked me. This was my first read of a book by Brett Battle's and now I can't wait to read his other books!

The Deceived is definitely a thriller and Battles has no trouble keeping up the pace or making his book engaging. The main character, Jonathan Quinn, is a professional "cleaner". When Quinn is called about a dead body in a shipping container he is shocked to discover that the dead body is his friend Steven Markoff, a ex-CIA agent. Quinn now has to find Markoff's girlfriend Jenny in hopes of discovering why Markoff's body was sent to him and why he was killed. And what he finds along the way is quite surprising.

Superb writing. Brett Battles write similarly to many of my favorite authors: Martin Cruz Smith, James Lee Burke, Jonathan Kellerman, and Barry Eisler. I look forward to whatever he's writing next!

Brett Battles created an excellent, unique story featuring Jonathan Quinn. He is a freelance professional 'Cleaner' - someone who comes in and cleans up messes for folks - making bodies disappear - cleaning up scenes that if the authorities were involved, they would cordon off and search for clues to 'whodunit'. Quinn is called to clean a job and finds the person he needs to have disappear is one of his friends in the business that saved his life. He feels an obligation to this person to find out why this happened. So starts a fast paced sequel to The Cleaner. Many of the same characters as The Cleaner, Nate, the apprentice in training with Quinn, Orlando, the beautiful Oriental lady whom Quinn is attracted to - and a slew of agents in the shadowy world of cleaning up someone elses 'messes'. This story takes the characters all over the globe, and Quinn does a lot of digging and heart searching to find out who killed his friend. It may have been about 30 pages too long, but it is still an excellent sequel to The Cleaner.