Troubleshooter

I began reading Hurwitz with the first in the Tim Rackley series and really enjoyed that book. Then I went back and tried to read The Tower and The Program and couldn't get into them. Troubleshooter is a great novel and a very fast read.

This was my first Gregg Hurwitz book and I was well pleased. Our hero of this novel is U.S. Marshall Tim Rackley(nicknamed Troubleshooter). He is a member of the Escape Team,responsible for apprehending dangerous fugitives. This story evolves around a motorcycle gang war. The two clubs are the Laughing Sinners and the Cholos. They are fighting for control of the meth market in California and Los Angeles. Two of the Laughing Sinners Den Laurey a club leader and Lance Kaner an enforcer are in federal custody. After sentencing they are freed in a spectacular escape. Upon their escape they immediately kill off the Cholos(37 members) during a funeral ride. Rackley's wife Dray is a deputy for the Ventura County Sheriff's Department. She is also 8 months pregnant. She is gunned down by Den Laurey but manages to live in a comotose state. In the meantime the Laughing Sinners re getting ready to introduce a new heroin called "Allah's Tears" to the drug market. The task force discovers a bizarre methos the the Laughing Sinners are using to sneak the heroin into the country. All the time Tim Rackley are battling the network that the Laughing Sinners has established. This is a very good book that I certainly enjoyed. Be sure to read it.

Rackley and his wife Dray are at it again, taking on some really bad guys and trying to dispense justice. Rackley and the US Marshals team up with the FBI to bring down an outlaw biker gang. Rackley and his sheriff deputy's wife Dray are in the middle of things, pursuing the bad guys and fighting their own demons. These are some really mean and nasty dudes and you begin to wonder who will come out ahead. Non stop action and a very intriguing plot will keep you reading well into the night.

Trouble Shooter by Gregg Hurwitz is the book for you if you want a thriller that grabs you on the first page and continues till the end. This book is a page turner. The story line and characters of wicked bikers is a welcome change. This author gets better with each book but this one will be hard to surpass.

If the year 2005 becomes known as "The Year of Hurwitz," TROUBLESHOOTER will be the reason why. Greg Hurwitz has written a number of fine books with nary a miss since THE TOWER, his debut novel. He began a new upward trajectory, however, with THE KILL CLAUSE, the first of his novels to feature U.S. Marshal Tim Rackley, and 2004's THE PROGRAM continued this trend. But neither will prepare you for the masterpiece that is TROUBLESHOOTER. Any thriller, at its most basic level, needs a good, believable bogeyman that will scare the heck out of the reader. TROUBLESHOOTER has a whole group of them --- a biker gang known as the Laughing Sinners. The Sinners seem to run the streets of southern California with impunity, due to a combination of street smarts, mind-numbing violence, and the legal machinations of a cunning attorney. The book begins with the guarded transport of Den Laurey and Kaner, two members of the Sinners' nomad chapter --- so called because they have no fixed territory or home --- following their arrest for murder. Their brutal and daring escape leads to the formation of a task force charged with recapturing them, with whatever force it takes, and bringing the Sinners down. Rackley, who is heading up the task force, almost recaptures Laurey but is outmanned and outgunned --- a situation that results in tragic personal consequences for Rackley mere minutes later when his pregnant wife Dray, herself a sheriff's deputy, is attacked and left for dead in the bikers' wake. Rackley must detach his personal grief and desire for revenge from his duties as task force director, even as these elements merge and intersect as the U.S. Marshal's Office and the Sinners play a continuous game of cat-and-mouse for the highest possible stakes. As the task force methodically pursues the gang, it learns that the activities of the Sinners have consequences that will affect not only southern California but also national security. As always, Hurwitz's research is first-rate; combined with his considerable narrative talents, TROUBLESHOOTER gives the reader an over-the-shoulder view of a counterculture within a counterculture. The Sinners, self-styled "one-percenters" --- their name based upon the truism that 99 percent of bikers are law-abiding citizens --- are not merely societal nonconformists following a creed of "live and let live," but rather are outlaws at war with society, feeding off of it even as they provide vices such as sex and drugs so desired by some. The relationship, subtly but graphically demonstrated here, is more parasitic than symbiotic. Hurwitz wisely refuses to blur the lines here, choosing instead to paint a clear picture of law enforcement and evil at their respective best and worst while providing a breakneck narrative that races to a conclusion --- two of them, actually --- that will satisfy everyone, on all counts. Ultimately, TROUBLESHOOTER is an undeniable winner. --- Reviewed by Joe Hartlaub