SINS OF THE ASSASSIN
Robert Ferrigno
Scribner
Futuristic Thriller
ISBN: 9781416537656

SINS OF THE ASSASSIN is the second entry in Robert Ferrigno’s Assassin Trilogy, which began so famously and brilliantly with PRAYERS FOR THE ASSASSIN.

The novel is set in 2043, a few years after the conclusion of the first book. I’m not quite sure how Ferrigno managed this feat, but it’s not necessary to read PRAYERS FOR THE ASSASSIN before digging into this one (though you’ll absolutely want to). In this series, the author visualizes a United States of America that has been ripped asunder. New York and Washington, D.C. are nuclear wastelands. The Islamic Republic, uneasily ruled by moderate Muslims, lies to the West; the Christian Bible Belt to the South. Canada is set on encroachment to the North, while the Aztlan Empire lays an increasingly emboldened claim to the Southwest. The balance of power is uneasy and precarious; it is threatened to be permanently upset when the president of the Islamic Republic learns that Colonel Zachary Smitts, a rogue military officer in the Bible Belt, is hunting for an ultimate weapon of unknown design that was hidden beneath a mountain range in the closing days of the United States.

Rakkim Epps, seemingly near death at the close of PRAYERS FOR THE ASSASSIN, is assigned to execute a covert operation into the Bible Belt to learn the worth of the weapon and then to steal it or destroy it. Epps is accompanied by Leo, an emotionally inept 19-year-old going on 13, whose technologically enhanced brain is inhibited only by his personality. Opposing Epps is Gravenholtz, Smitts’s second in command, an artificially enhanced killer whose ability to kill is exceeded only by his enjoyment of the task. There is also Baby, Smitts’s wife and a temptress without peer.

Even as Epps carries out his mission, struggling against his grudging admiration for the Colonel, radical Islamics are planning their own mission against the moderate president of the Islamic Republic --- a mission that they feel is divinely ordained and inspired but is financed and led by the Old One, a deadly enemy possessed of a limitless intellect and endless wealth. From the lawless backwoods of Virginia where a snake-handling militia prepares for the end of days to the streets of Seattle, where black-robed Islamic extremists mete out a rough and immediate corporal punishment with impunity, Epps faces danger and death at every turn.

SINS OF THE ASSASSIN contains violence, unrelenting and uncompromising, unbridled erotica (I’m still waiting for my eyeballs to come completely unsteamed) and memorable characters you will never forget. Most significantly, however, it is set in a world in which Ferrigno has seemingly accounted for every element, every nuance; a world that is so different from yet so very close to our own, simply without the official and acknowledged boundaries. Frightening, exhilarating and eminently readable from beginning to end, this is a book for all seasons.

    --- Reviewed by Joe Hartlaub

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