Review: Assassin Buffet
Rating: 4 out of 5
Date: 05 31, 2011
Paris Is A Bitch is the second straight to Kindle short story by Barry Eisler.  This one starts John Rain, his half-Japanese, half-American hitman that he's written six books about.  His seventh John Rain novel, The Detachment, is coming out sometime from someone (if you haven't kept up with all the flapdoodle surrounding that book, just Google it sometime and see if you can track the events and find out when it's being released).Overall, I enjoyed this story.  I'd read the first John Rain novel and enjoyed it, but just haven't made time for the other books.  Friends who love this kind of suspense/thriller keep telling me I gotta read the rest of the series.  I will.  Just not right this minute.  But soon.So I had some catching up to do with this story.  In a way, it's a good introduction of John Rain and his girlfriend Delilah (a Mossad operative who uses sex as a weapon) and their relationship problems.  See the "sex as a weapon" for one of those problems.I liked the way Rain and Delilah reacted to the threat taking shape around them, and the factual way they laid out what they were going to do and why.  This is martial professionalism that rings true.  And it should.  Before becoming a bestselling author, Eisler worked for the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) so it stands to reason he knows the ins and outs of spycraft.The laundry list of potential hitters was interesting and did a lot to intrigue me more about the Rain series.  I gotta get to those books!Eisler also does a good job of immersing the reader in Paris and in the moment.  The tension racheted up all through the sequence of event, and I was almost ready to start dodging shadows before the story wraps.  The ending leaves you anxious for the next book, but it ultimately satisfies for the moment.I'm still not happy with paying $2.99 for a short story, but I did.  It'll be interesting to see if I ultimately draw the line later.  Right now everything is still new to the Kindle, and I like reads that I can do in a single sitting.  But I could get the same experience by picking up a $2.99 anthology by other good writers.