Bookstooge's Reviews On the Road: Tom Wood

Showing posts with label Tom Wood. Show all posts

Wednesday, September 06, 2023

Traitor (Victor the Assassin #10) 4Stars

Title: Traitor
Series: Victor the Assassin #10
Authors: Tom Wood
Rating: 4 of 5 Stars
Genre: Action/Adventure
Pages: 367
Words: 105K

This was a return to form for Victor the Assassin and a very welcome return in my opinion. Instead of Victor killing boatloads of people because they’re trying to kidnap a retarded kid, Victor is killing boatloads of people because someone betrayed him and is sending killteams after him.

This was a multiple layer story about various jobs that ended up all tying together. And of course, the obvious double cross turns out NOT to be a double cross at all but a mere accident. I thought that bit of a lime twist really added flavor to the story. Victor’s reaction to it however was Classic Victor and exactly what I expected from him.

The only downside was that by the time the story ended Victor was once again in hock to yet another powerful individual/corporation/government. That pattern is old by now even while I acknowledge that it works. It certainly works much better than having Victor “keeping a promise to a kid” so maybe I better be careful what I wish for.

This is the latest release, so now I’m going to have to wait for each new release as it comes out.

★★★★☆

From the Publisher

SOMEONE'S SET HIM UP

SOMEONE'S GOING TO DIE

When Victor is arrested for a murder that, for once, he didn't commit, escape must surely be inevitable for a hitman of his ferocity.

Yet someone wants Victor put away, and he finds himself behind bars, incarcerated by police who have no idea of the monster they are dealing with and have, apparently, tamed.

Quickly, however, his fellow the prisoners realise that he's not trapped in there with them: they are in a cage, with the most dangerous of enemies. And Victor has a traitor to find.

All of My “Victor the Assassin” Reviews

Saturday, August 19, 2023

A Quiet Man (Victor the Assassin #9) 3.5Stars

Title: A Quiet Man
Series: Victor the Assassin #9
Authors: Tom Wood
Rating: 3.5 of 5 Stars
Genre: Action/Adventure
Pages: 338
Words: 94K

This was a good “killer does his thing” story but it just wasn’t a Victor the Assassin. The premise is based on Victor going against every survival instinct and rule that he’s ever had to help find a special needs boy who he promised to take fishing. This from the man who poisoned the woman he loved because she “might” turn on him at some random time in the distant future? Yeah, I didn’t buy it all, not one tiny bit.

So that is why this got a halfstar knocked off it’s shiny metal aff. Other than that, this was great! Meth cooker gets burned by gangsters. Victor dukes it out with some lowlife thugs, cuts off all their fingers and delivers said fingers to the man who hired them. Victor takes on a whole team of special forces guys and kills them all. Oh yeah, that was pure awesome. It was stupid, because he was supposedly dying from a bullet wound to his thigh that nicked an artery or something, but hey, whatever. I’m also supposed to believe that Canadians are just so oh so polite and are the best people in the world? How that trucker convoy got handled shows the truth of that. But like I said, you don’t read these books for the realism.

Plus, the cover gives it all away. In case you don’t know, the maple leaf is actually a cabalistic symbol about ritualized secrets too horrible to divulge here in public. If I told you, your life wouldn’t be worth a plug nickel, heck it probably wouldn’t even be worth a penny, nay, not even a widow’s mite! And that’s taking the current inflation into account too. Since you won’t read any more reviews by me if you’re dead, I’m choosing to do the right thing (for myself) and not telling you the secrets. Feel free to thank me in the comments for sparing your miserable, misbegotten life.
/s

Thus, this was another fantastic entry about a lethal killer lethally killing other lethal killers. Doesn’t get much more lethal than that. If it did, I’d have to kill you. Again.

★★★✬☆

From the Publisher

One day a man arrives in town. Unassuming. Quiet.

The assassin known as Victor is hiding out in a small motel in Canada after a job across the border. A few days laying low and he'll be gone and leave no trace behind.

He doesn't count on getting to know a mother and her boy who reminds him of his own troubled childhood. When both vanish, only Victor seems to notice.

Once he starts looking for them, he finds himself at odds with the criminals who own the town. They want him gone. Only Victor's going nowhere until he discovers the truth and to them he's just a quiet man asking the wrong questions.

But that quiet man is a dangerous man.

All of My “Victor the Assassin” Reviews

Friday, July 14, 2023

Kill for Me (Victor the Assassin #8) 4Stars

Title: Kill for Me
Series: Victor the Assassin #8
Authors: Tom Wood
Rating: 4 of 5 Stars
Genre: Action/Adventure
Pages: 364
Words: 114K

Victor gets involved in a Guatemalan drug cartel war between two sisters. And dates a DEA (drug enforcement agency) agent. I was sure she was going to die, but color me surprised, she not only survives but gets a big score, thanks (all unknowingly of course) to Victor.

This felt like a very different Victor book. Thinking about it though, each book has never been a clone of the previous ones. Here, Victor has shed his chains to both the US and the UK intelligence agencies and is trying to live his life anonymously again. I’m not sure that’s possible, but the very fact that the token romance girl actually survived this time throws my every calculation off now. And that’s a good thing. Being a predictable author is as bad as being a predictable assassin.

I saw the one double cross, mainly because it was so obvious that even I couldn’t miss it. The other two, I kind of suspected but wasn’t sure so it was a nice little surprise to see how they all worked out.

Overall, I thoroughly enjoyed this. I am not sure why I enjoyed it as much as I did, but I think the lack of world politics and intelligence agencies played a big part. Give me the Pure Assassin of Death, not some chained lackey of da’ Man….

★★★★☆

From the Publisher

Lethal assassin Victor lands in the middle of a Guatemalan cartel war in the latest nonstop thriller from the international bestselling author of The Final Hour.

Victor is the killer who always delivers...for the right price. And Heloise Espinosa, patron of Guatemala's largest cartel, is ready and willing to pay him just that to eliminate the competition--her sister. Heloise has been battling Maria for control of the cartel in an endless and bloody war. Now Victor decides who survives. An easy job if it weren't for the sudden target on his back.

Victor's not the only one on the hunt. Someone else has Maria in their crosshairs and will do anything to get the kill. In the middle of cartel territory with enemies closing in from all sides, Victor must decide where to put the bullet before one is placed in his head. His only chance at survival is to team up with the one person who may be as deadly as he is...

All of My “Victor the Assassin” Reviews

Tuesday, May 23, 2023

The Final Hour (Victor the Assassin #7) ★★★★☆

Title: The Final Hour
Series: Victor the Assassin #7
Authors: Tom Wood
Rating: 4 of 5 Stars
Genre: Action/Adventure
Pages: 321
Words: 106K

From the Publisher

SOMETIMES THE ONLY WAY TO LIVE...

Victor is the ultimate predator. He surfaces to kill, then disappears into thin air. But he's a disposable commodity for the powerful people he works for--both the good guys and the bad. And no one has his back. Especially now that doing black bag jobs for the CIA has put a target on his head...

...IS TO DIE.

Antonio Alvarez, a high-ranking US intelligence official, is determined to clean house and find the legendary killer who slipped away from him during an operation in Paris. There's only one person Victor can turn to for help: a lethal female assassin whose life he once saved. And now Victor wants her to return the favor--by killing him....

In The Darkest Day, Victor ran across another assassin, one who was as beautiful as she was deadly. And Victor kills her but with just once chance for her to survive. She survives. She not only survives Victor, but she survives the amorphous Company that wants her dead. So when Victor needs to die, to get all the Alphabets off his back, he knows she can handle it.

Meanwhile, a new, powerful hotshot Homeland Security Director (man, I HATE Homeland Security. We did not need yet another powerful governmental agency destroying our rights and freedoms in the name of safety. And they are as rapacious about power as the now politically weaponized FBI and as crooked as the CIA that has spied on its own citizens) wants Victor dead, even without knowing exactly who Victor is.

This was a tight rope of a story. Miss Assassin recovery and surviving to Victor being hounded to the inevitable massive explosion that Victor hopes will convince his enemies that he is dead. And he still walks away from Miss Assassin. But. He doesn’t kill her this time. That was a huuuuge step towards Victor being an actual human :-) But no worries, he still tells her that if he sees her again they are enemies and he will kill her. Now THAT’S the Victor I’ve come to know and love, hahahaa. What a guy.

I really like this no holds barred action series. While Victor is completely immoral (he might say he’s amoral, but killing other people is immoral by even the most hardened and jaded of criminals standards), he’s in the business of killing other immoral people. Evil devours itself. That is its nature after all.

★★★★☆

All of My “Victor the Assassin” Reviews

Thursday, April 06, 2023

A Time To Die (Victor the Assassin #6) ★★★✬☆

Title: A Time To Die
Series: Victor the Assassin #6
Authors: Tom Wood
Rating: 3.5 of 5 Stars
Genre: Action/Adventure
Pages: 316
Words: 100K

From Bookstooge.blog

Victor is now working for the British, since the CIA really doesn’t want someone who was implicated in trying to nuke New York City. His latest assignment is to erase an eastern european crime lord. In the process Victor tries to help a woman who’s been sold into prostitution. She dies, the crime lord dies and Victor kills the man who killed the woman. Then there’s the assassins who are trying to take the new bounty put out on Victor’s head by someone who has a LOT of details on him (well, one of his identities anyway). Victor goes mano-a-mano in a junk yard and emerges victorious by lying to his adversary and putting two bullets in him point blank.

Nobody lives happily ever after, hurray!

Separator

These are great books for what they are. Action packed adventures of an assassin with his own code of rules that he lives assiduously by. By this time though, he’s made enough enemies and somebody has sold his identity (well, one of them) so he’s not only trying to complete an almost impossible assignment for the British but he’s dodging assassins at the same time. I loved it.

At the same time, I wonder how many more books the author can stretch things out before Victor’s identity is irreparably compromised? While I have no problem with assassins constantly coming after Victor, there are only so many false identities he can burn through. For someone who needs to remain anonymous, every id burnt is another escape route now denied him. I feel like Victor is running down a hill with an avalanche right behind him. How long can he outrun it?

I don’t see him ever retiring and living his remaining days out on some sunlit beach with a cold drink in one hand and a gun in the other. He’s going work until he’s killed. Not exactly something to look forward to in the series but it fits with everything that has happened so far.

★★★✬☆

All of My “Victor the Assassin” Reviews

Monday, March 06, 2023

The Darkest Day (Victor the Assassin #5) ★★★☆☆

Title: The Darkest Day
Series: Victor the Assassin #5
Authors: Tom Wood
Rating: 3 of 5 Stars
Genre: Action/Adventure
Pages: 293
Words: 90K

Ol’ Victorewsky is hired to whack an arms dealer. Only it turns into an ambush and Victor is almost killed by another assassin. The CIA operative who set up the original hit lets Victor know the other assassin is a rogue agent and one of the best. Victor sets out on her trail and in the process sets himself up as a dupe in a potential terrorist attack by the aforementioned CIA operative. Victor and Miss Assassin ally and take down a group of special forces who are going to use a dirty nuke in New York City. They give the evidence to Victor’s handler so everything is ship shape. Then Miss Assassin tries to hook up with Victor, because being an assassin is lonely business. And Victor kills her because she knows too much about him. Ohhhhhhh, snap!

I was enjoying the first part of this book immensely. Victor almost getting offed and realizing there is somebody else as good as him was great. But once he hits NYC and hooks up with Miss Assassin, it all went to the crapper. Most of that is because Victor gets chased through the city and the cops keep finding him. Now, that doesn’t sound so bad does it? BUT! There is a blackout. There is a massive rainstorm. Everybody is stuck on the road because of the blackout. And the flipping cops keep finding Victor like he’s the prize in a box of cracker jax. It was just too much for me. NYC, even just the part that is Manhattan Island, is too big and busy for cops to find one guy in those circumstances. It was like Woods was treating NYC like some little sleepy one street European town. While I avoid big cities, I’ve been in a couple (and never want to do it again if I can help it) and the thought of the cops being able to find me at the drop of a hat is just ludicrous.

So that really took down my enjoyment. A lot. To the point where I was thinking about giving this 2 stars. But then the ending redeemed it when Victor shows what an absolute psychopath loner he is. It made me say outloud, “Oh, that is BRUTAL!” But it was consistent with how he had lived his entire life and it wouldn’t have made sense at all for Victor to get romantically involved with another assassin who could identify him. This series has been consistently good and I am glad Wood (the author) didn’t skimp here and try to make Victor some sort of “relatable” guy. He’s a successful assassin, period.

★★★☆☆

All of My “Victor the Assassin” Reviews

Wednesday, January 25, 2023

Better Off Dead (Victor the Assassin #4) ★★★☆☆

This review is written with a GPL 4.0 license and the rights contained therein shall supersede all TOS by any and all websites in regards to copying and sharing without proper authorization and permissions. Crossposted at WordPress & Blogspot by Bookstooge’s Exalted Permission
Title: Better Off Dead
Series: Victor the Assassin #4
Authors: Tom Wood
Rating: 3 of 5 Stars
Genre: Action/Adventure
Pages: 257
Words: 115K

Victor helps out the daughter of a Russian Mob Boss who he used to have ties with. Said Mob Boss was also married to a woman who Victor loved from afar, because he knew no woman could survive being involved with him. So while the daughter isn’t his daughter, she is emotionally. And it turns out it is because the daughter read a legal brief that mentioned a high ranking British Intelligence woman who is trying to clean up her past, by any means necessary.

Lots of killing ensues. And car chases. And big russian mobsters getting cut to rags by corrupt american special forces. And Victor killing them in turn.

This series has a very simple premise and Wood does a good job of sticking to it and not trying to turn Victor into something he’s not. I appreciate that simplicity.

★★★☆☆

All of My “Victor the Assassin” Reviews

Wednesday, December 14, 2022

The Game (Victor the Assassin #3) ★★★☆☆

Title: The Game
Series: Victor the Assassin #3
Authors: Tom Wood
Rating: 3 of 5 Stars
Genre: Action/Adventure
Pages: 405
Words: 115K

Victor, now working for the CIA, kills a fellow assassin, who had taken out an American. Can’t let that kind of behavior stand, so Victor does the deed. Only for the CIA to find out that this merc had been recruited to pull off a “big job” and without him, they have zero leads. So Victor has to pretend to be the merc and find out what’s going on and to stop it if necessary. We get a new CIA liaison for Victor and I must say, she was simply incompetent and improbable. Every time she meets up with Victor she’s all worried about him and bemoaning that she placed him in “such a dangerous situation”. I think the author was trying to show that she wasn’t a ruthless scumbag like Victor’s previous handler, but man, it came across the wrong way.

So Victor has to join a group of mercs but he doesn’t know what the job entails. It gets to the point where he’s about to walk out the door because of the lack of details and suddenly the criminal mastermind reveals that he has kidnapped a woman and child who he thinks are Victor’s (as he is pretending to be another man), so as to blackmail him. As soon as Victor didn’t kill everyone, I knew where this was going and once another mercenary was killed by the top mercenary, I knew where THAT was going. Everything turns into an electric boogaloo doublecross, only Victor goes all noble and saves the wife and kid. And the big bad plot? To kill a russian security officer. It was kind of disappointing that it wasn’t a nuke, or a plague or something!

So nothing bad here, just a mundane action/adventure story. I think that’s how the whole series is going to be and so I need to adjust my expectations accordingly.

★★★☆☆

Sunday, October 16, 2022

The Enemy (Victor the Assassin #2) ★★★☆☆

Title: The Enemy
Series: Victor the Assassin #2
Authors: Tom Wood
Rating: 3 of 5 Stars
Genre: Action/Adventure
Pages: 403
Words: 134K

★★★☆☆

The Killer (Book 1)

Monday, September 26, 2022

The Killer (Victor the Assassin #1) ★★★☆☆

Title: The Killer
Series: Victor the Assassin #1
Authors: Tom Wood
Rating: 3 of 5 Stars
Genre: Action/Adventure
Pages: 436
Words: 140K

Synopsis:

From the author's website:

His name is a cover

He has no home

And he kills for a living

Victor is a hitman, a man with no past and no surname. His world is one of paranoia and obsessive attention to detail; his morality lies either dead or dying. No one knows what truly motivates the hunter. No one gets close enough to ask.

When a Paris job goes spectacularly wrong, Victor finds himself running for his life across four continents, pursued by a kill squad and investigated by secret services from more than one country. With meticulous style, Victor plans his escape . . . and takes the fight to his would-be killers.

In this first novel in the explosive Victor series, it's not about right and wrong - only about who lives and who dies.

My Thoughts:

As you can see by this cover, this was originally called The Killer. When I went to the author's website to track down some synopsis info, I found that it had been toned down to the namby pamby hold your hand while you cry about the beautiful daisies title of The Hunter. I read The Killer and thus I'm sticking with that title. Because I'm not a namby pamby who is going to hold your hand while you cry about the unicorn farts destroying the ozone or some such nonsense.

As you can see, this put me in a fine fettle.

Victor is a loner who goes around killing people for money. So he's betrayed on one mission (well duh!) and spends the rest of the book trying to track down who did him wrong. Turns out it was the CIA and by the end of the book he's been hired by the CIA to be their disavowed agent, in return he gets to kill the guy who set him up.

Victor is a blank slate and has as much characterization as Tostito's Salsa Con Queso.

That's not necessarily a bad thing for an amoral contract killer. He's not John Wick though.

Overall, this was decent but it felt a bit overlong and drawn out. The addition of the Broker, who is a woman and ends up getting killed after almost making it through the situation alive, could have been cut or handled in a different manner to slim things down. The story felt like an American who is full of Tostito's Salsa Con Queso, ie, fat and over stuffed.

I'll read the next book or two and hope the author puts his writing on a diet.

★★★☆☆