Review: Hard-crunching thriller with well-developed characters
Rating: 4 out of 5
Date: 02 7, 2011
A superior self-contained-world thriller, "Storm Surge" not only delivers swift-paced excitement in a uniquely spooky environment -- a southeast American island sealed off from the rest of the world by a Category 5 hurricane -- but it takes the time to develop interesting, fully dimensional characters without missing a beat. Max Chase is an antihero with a conflicted past in the Jack Reacher mold -- yet very much his own man -- who is surprised to discover that he has a soft spot for struggling single-mom waitress Sharon and her sullen yet spunky teen daughter, Glory. All three are fully realized characters that the reader comes to care about as they weave in and out of the clutches of a gang of hardened professionals criminals bent on using the storm as cover to keep a hidden secret from slipping into the wrong hands. The prose is taut, artful in places, andIf I had any quibbles, it's that I would have liked to have seen author J.D. Rhoades raise the stakes for the reader by giving the bad guys just as much backstory and breadth of character. When you care almost as much about the baddies as you do the good guys, it creates a delicious moral ambiguity that makes it much harder to see the black hats go down -- as, inevitably, they must. But "Storm Surge" still satisfies on just about every level, and it says something deeply unpleasant about the publishing industry that it took a pass on this highly commercial story and forced Rhoades to put it out himself. Fortunately, for us, he did, and at $[...], it's one of the best book bargains I've ever come across.