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Author: Kyle Mills
Title: The Second Horseman Genre: Brandon Vale never expected to break out of jail. He shouldn't have been there in the first place - he'd been framed - but with only a few months left, he wasn't looking to add to his sentence. That's why he was dismayed to find himself shoved into the darkness beyond the prison walls by a taciturn guard. But he ran anyway. What else could he do? Vale's involuntary jailbreak was arranged by Richard Scanlon, former FBI heavy now in "Security." That little detail didn't make Vale happy, since it was Scanlon who'd put him behind bars in the first place. Their reunion was, shall we say, a little strained. Scanlon, however, had a proposition: he'd provide financial backing and a team to pull off the biggest heist in history; all Vale had to do was plan and execute a $200-million caper. To sweeten the pot, Scanlon installed the scrumptious Catherine Juarez as Vale's handler and chief co-conspirator. Just why would an ex-Feeb turn to "the dark side" to pick up a couple hundred million dollars? Well, Scanlon was apparently a little short on pocket change, and he needed cash to buy a dozen nukes from some Ukrainian mobsters. The plan was to stash the weapons on a desert island and tip off the US Navy, thereby "awakening" the government to the horrendous realization that anybody can get his hands on an A-bomb if he has deep enough pockets. That's what a key advisor of the President told Scanlon, anyway. Will the heist go off without a hitch? Will Brandon the Burglar repair to South Africa once his caper's completed? When a bevy of bombs suddenly shows up, will it galvanize the government into action? Will this alliteration ever end? Stay tuned... There's so much of "Mission Impossible" in the plot of The Second Horseman that I half-expected my copy to self-destruct after five seconds. However, given the "MI" mixed with "Oceans Eleven/Twelve," the book has great potential as a fun little crime novel. Hero Brandon Vale - all brains and no brawn, a master thief who wouldn't hurt a fly - is an eminently likable character. And he's been partnered with a woman who might well have been named Catherine *cough "Zeta-Jones" cough* instead of "Juarez," considering author Kyle Mills's description. Given her beauty, athleticism, and brains; not to mention that she's involved in a major theft; there's pretty much no way a reader can escape picturing CZ-J in "Entrapment" when skimming the text. A fun little crime novel is exactly how the story chugs along through two-thirds of the book. Vale's ecstatic over having a team staffed by (the obligatory highly disciplined) ex-Rangers instead of career criminals; and he needs 'em - the heist Scanlon's got in mind might well be impossible without such a team. Mills adds in with some good twisties and a nicely patterned escalation in suspense; and while the robbery doesn't go off without a hitch, it definitely goes off. The problem with The Second Horseman is that once Vale's team have finished their riff on "Mission Impossible," there's still a third of a book left. And those A-bombs are still hidden somewhere deep in the Carpathians... So guess who's gonna end up going to get 'em. As the plot's focus lurches from an amusing crime caper to a deadly serious spy thriller, the book collapses of its own weight. The necessary additional suspension of disbelief is simply too long a reach in too short a space. Though Vale is completely believable as a meticulous master thief, his promotion to devil-may-care spy just plain doesn't work. He lacks sufficient motivation to risk his life in such a manner, regardless of whether his partner in crime looks like a certain Welsh beauty. Further disrupting the flow are the maunderings of Mill's villain, a certain Arab-American with a decidedly different purpose in mind for the twelve big metal eggs in this particular carton. What The Second Horseman looks like is a case of Mills having two unfinished plots around and a deadline fast approaching. The result is a nice little cat-burglar novella stitched haphazardly onto your basic terrorist plot. Mills recovers some momentum by pulling a surprise ending out of his hat, but it's just not enough, as mismatched halves remain out of balance to the end. Sure, it's fun to read - but so are other, better books. all content copyright © 2014 by scmrak
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