Book Reviews by Elizabeth A. White

I was pretty good at scheming myself. If that was the way he wanted to play the game, I would be happy to take him on.
- Matt Wells

There’s more than a little scheming going on in The Nameless Dead, the fourth, and last, book in author Paul Johnston’s Matt Wells series. In his guest post yesterday, Paul gave a much better summary of The Nameless Dead (and series as a whole) than I possibly could, so do check that out for a more detailed setup. The short version…

Following their involuntary assassination attempt on the President of the United States, British crime novelist Matt Wells and his pregnant girlfriend, London Metropolitan Detective Chief Superintendent Karen Oaten, are being held by the FBI. As their activities were the result of a mind control experiment performed by a Neo-Nazi group, the FBI is working on deprogramming Wells and Oaten.

Of course things wouldn’t be any fun if it was that simple. So when bodies begin turning up killed in a gruesome ritualistic manner reminiscent of that Neo-Nazi group, the FBI gets the bright idea to use Wells’ programming to their advantage and turn him loose to hunt down the group’s leader, Heinz Rothmann, the man responsible for Wells and Oaten’s predicament. As you’d expect, things don’t quite go as planned. (more…)

Today I am pleased to welcome Paul Johnston back for another guest post (read his first, here). Paul is the accomplished author of three different series: the Matt Wells series (featuring investigative crime reporter Wells), Quint Dalrymple series (crime-SF crossover novels set in a futuristic Edinburgh), and the Greece-set Alex Mavros series. Tomorrow I’ll be reviewing The Nameless Dead from the Matt Wells series, but today Paul’s going to share a secret about what fuels his writing.

Ostensibly I’m here to talk about The Nameless Dead, the fourth and last in my series featuring crime writer turned investigator Matt Wells. So, before the knife cuts to the bone, as the Greeks say, let me do that.

At the beginning of The Nameless Dead, Wells and his heavily pregnant lover Karen are being held prisoner in a joint FBI/US Army camp in Illinois, following their involvement in an attempt to assassinate the President (see book 3, Maps of Hell). They had been brainwashed and are undergoing treatment to reverse the process. Meanwhile, a series of violent murders leads the FBI to suspect that the mastermind behind the attack on POTUS is still at large. Wells is trained up and sent to find the criminal who messed with his mind, soon finding himself up against hired killers, a neo-Nazi conspiracy linked to a Satanic cult, and a fundamentalist Christian private military contractor. Oh, and his former lover Sara Robbins – now the deadly hit woman known as the Soul Collector (the title of book 2 in the series) – is back on his trail. To make things even worse (you know what thrillers do – multiply the hero’s jeopardy ad infinitum), Matt suffers the most appalling personal loss, one that drives him to a real underworld, set design courtesy of John Milton and Hieronymus Bosch. You can never have too much eschatology. (more…)

Like the gun-slingers in the movies, there were things you couldn’t say no to, there were things you had to do. – Grace Helmer

At its bare-bones, The Last Red Death has a deceptively straightforward premise: a woman who witnessed the murder of her diplomat father when she was a child returns to the county where it happened and hires a local private investigator to help her track down the man responsible for the murder. As with any great thriller worth its salt, however, things aren’t that straightforward.

The woman, American Grace Helmer, didn’t witness a random act of violence or mugging gone wrong. No, her father was murdered by Iraklis, a rogue offshoot of the Communist Party in Greece which was responsible for a string of terrorist activity in the 70s. And the investigator she hires, Alex Mavros, is himself searching for someone, his brother, who was last seen at an underground resistance meeting thirty years prior.

Further, the recent murders of two high-profile businessmen, both marked with Iraklis’ signature calling card, seems to herald the return of the group after over a decade of dormancy. Tracking down the answers Alex and Grace want may get messy, but like those movie gunslingers, there are some things you just have to do. (more…)

Today I am pleased to welcome Paul Johnston for a guest post. Though he’s criminally under-the-radar here in the States, Paul is the accomplished author of three different series: the Matt Wells series (featuring investigative crime reporter Wells), Quint Dalrymple series (crime-SF crossover novels set in a futuristic Edinburgh), and the Greece-set Alex Mavros series. It’s that last series Paul is talking about today, and from which The Last Red Death, the book I will be reviewing tomorrow, comes.

The second of my Greece-set novels, The Last Red Death, first saw the light of day in 2003 and was republished in 2009. So why the hell am I writing about it now?

Some background. I was born in Edinburgh, Scotland, and studied classics there and at Oxford. But the formative period in my life was the six months I spent as a somewhat ham-fisted tour guide in Greece between school and college. Obviously I was already fascinated by ancient Greek literature and history, but the experience of the ‘real’ country and its people turned me on to the modern culture and language – to the extent that I changed my degree and ended up majoring in Modern Greek.

From then on, I was interested only in returning to the country to live, something I finally managed in 1987. I’ve been moving between the UK and Greece ever since, but now spend much more time in our new home in Nafplio, a beautiful seaside town in the Peloponnese, about 100 miles southwest of Athens.

After writing a series of five crime-SF crossover novels set in a futuristic Edinburgh, I finally found the time (and publishing contract) to do what I’d really been wanting to do for years – write crime novels set in Greece. Note: this was in 2000, well before the current financial woes that are ripping the country apart – back then there wasn’t much crime, apart from corruption. But there was no shortage of other problems. One of them was the caustic effect of sudden tourism-based prosperity in previously dirt-poor island communities. I wrote about that in A Deeper Shade of Blue, republished as Crying Blue Murder. (more…)

If there was one thing I had learned in the U.S., it was the benefit of nailing your enemies before they nailed you. – Matt Wells

In Maps of Hell, British crime writer Matt Wells initially has a bigger problem on his hands than nailing his enemies… he has to figure out who he is first.

The book opens with Matt regaining consciousness in a tiny cell, naked, beaten and unable to recall who he is or how he got there. He’s taken from his cell repeatedly for bizarre, Clockwork Orange-esque sessions aimed at conditioning his mind… but to what end? Matt doesn’t want to stick around long enough to find out.

Taking advantage of a lapse in one of the sessions he makes a daring escape, during which he realizes that he – and many others – are being held and experimented on by a fringe militia group at a compound deep in the forests of Maine. His memory slowly returns while he’s on the run trying desperately to stay one step ahead of his militia pursuers. And they aren’t the only ones looking for him.

A series of gruesome murders have been occurring in Washington, D.C., with Matt’s fingerprints turning up at one of the crime scenes. If that wasn’t bad enough, he’s also wanted for questioning in the disappearance of his girlfriend, British DCI Karen Oaten, who was in D.C. to meet with the Department of Justice.

Now, in addition to trying to stay one step ahead of the militia members tracking him, Matt also has to decide whether to go to the authorities and trust them to believe his story, or try on his own to solve the puzzle of his abduction, his girlfriend’s disappearance, and why he’s being framed for murder.

Maps of Hell is a truly frantic and engaging read. It is decidedly unnerving to be thrust into a world where the narrator, normally the reader’s guide, himself doesn’t know precisely what’s going on. And author Paul Johnston has captured Matt’s fear and confusion in a way that’s so vivid it’s almost palpable:

When I came round, I didn’t have a clue where I was. My head was ringing with strange sounds and I saw a blur of colors and shapes. Gradually my vision cleared, but my ears were still filled with discordant voices. There was a foul stench in my nostrils. I tried to move, but my arms and legs were confined. I looked down and saw that I had been tied to a wheelchair. I was wearing paper clothes again. I felt a twinge of alarm and glanced around. What I saw wasn’t reassuring.

Having read the previous two books in the Matt Wells series is not required in order to enjoy Maps of Hell. In fact, not having done so could arguably enhance the experience as the reader would truly be discovering everything for the first time right along with Matt as he struggles to understand who he is and what’s happening to him.

Author Paul Johnston consistently produces books that manage to take a familiar premise and completely turn it on its ear, and nowhere is that more apparent than in Maps of Hell. If you’ve not read anything by Johnston before, grab a copy of Maps of Hell and begin your journey into the mind of one of the most creative – and criminally under the radar – thriller writers working today.

Maps of Hell is available from Mira (ISBN: 978-0778327783).