WALKING DEAD
Greg Rucka
Bantam
Thriller
ISBN: 9780553804744
It’s been almost two years since the release of a new Greg Rucka thriller. It’s not as if he’s been idle; Rucka is active in the comic book world, currently writing Action Comics for DC. We last saw him in novel form, however, in 2007’s PATRIOT ACTS, which continued his Atticus Kodiak series. WALKING DEAD, his latest work, also stars Atticus, and it’s a fine addition.
Rucka is in pulse-pounding form here, combining an addictive narrative with a riveting storyline to create what may well be his best book to date in the Kodiak mythos. WALKING DEAD opens with Atticus and his lover, Alena, living in Kobuleti, Georgia. As Atticus describes it, Kobuleti is a place where people go to hide, and indeed, that is precisely what Atticus and Alena are doing. Their neighbors, the Lagidze family, appear to be doing the same thing, and the two households maintain a cordial but respectful distance from each other, with the primary contact between them consisting of dance lessons provided by Alena to Tiasa, the Lagidzes’ 14-year-old daughter.
All of that changes suddenly and irrevocably when the Lagidze family is slaughtered in the dead of night and Tiasa is abducted. The plot from thereon is simple: Atticus moves heaven and earth and attempts to find Tiasa and bring her back. What does he do? Everything. What does he expend? Everything. What does he sacrifice? Money, body, and a part of his soul.
Tiasa, he quickly discovers, is in the hands of people who are the embodiment, the manifestation, of an evil so dastardly that there is no justice appropriate for it other than the ultimate one that Atticus, for the most part, dispenses as he follows a trail that grows cold within a matter of hours and seemingly impossible to track with each passing day. It is one that will take him from the former Soviet bloc to Dubai, from Turkey to New York, from Ireland to Las Vegas, trailing an opponent who is fully prepared for trouble.
If you thought you knew Atticus before, think again: he has never been so focused, so driven, so formidable. Yet Rucka instills within him a humanity, a goodness, and a fragility, if you will, that we don’t always find in fictional heroes. Atticus gets banged up here, sustaining damage that he almost can’t walk away from, and it takes its toll as the novel progresses. But he has much to live for, including a bombshell that relieves some of the unrelenting grimness of what he encounters.
Rucka is possessed of a fine sense of irony steeled with tension, one that is infused into WALKING DEAD from first page to last. You’ll have this book open for so long at one sitting that you will feel as if it is bound with a coiled spring until you finish it.
--- Reviewed by Joe Hartlaub
Click here now to buy this book from Amazon.com.
© Copyright 1996-2009, Bookreporter.com. All rights reserved.
