Review: "You can't trust freedom when it's not in your hands."
Rating: 4 out of 5
Date: 03 1, 2014
No Remorse picks up right where Red Flag left off, exploring the idea of two ordinary people trying to manage their relationship in a war zone. A wedding is once more the catalyst for Alex and Gloria to travel to Chinese occupied Taipei, where there is a tenuous peace since the occupation. However, this time round, the wedding is their own. Yikes! Didn’t they learn last time? Without filling this review with spoilers, No Remorse is a much darker outing than Red Flag, and Alex and Gloria come much closer to the conflict than before.Greene also elevates the intensity of the plot in No Remorse, and in particular, the shocking war scenes that were introduced in Red Flag. There’s a lot of the appeal in the way Greene describes battle and war scenes. They’re never pretty, heroic or glorious. They’re nasty, grim and horrifying. Innocent people die in unpleasant ways, as surely they must do in real wars.Again, the story shifts between characters on all sides of the conflict, as well as those that are caught in the middle - the collateral damage. No Remorse has the same documentary feel as Red Flag, with multiple viewpoints, that are not necessarily directly connected other than painting a broad picture of the situation. As a pleasant shift of perspective, we get to hear Gloria’s side of the story in No Remorse, where we had only heard from Alex in the first book.This episode has a lot more substance than the first book too, and explores the themes started in Red Flag in more detail. If it wasn’t fiction, you’d be tempted to get hold of Alex and Gloria and tell them to move to a quieter part of the world.