I have mixed feelings about The Bomb Maker. I found the technical information about bomb making and disarming interesting—more than I would ever need or want to know. The characters weren’t very well developed and we never found out who the bomb maker was or why he was doing it. The ending was abrupt.
The book is classified as suspense/thriller on Amazon. I thought it was more a police procedural.
All that said, I enjoyed it enough to finish it.
With appropriate timing—fifty years after MLK died, Steve Berry gives a fictional version of how and why the assassination took place.
The bulk of the story takes place 18 years ago when old paperwork from FBI files resurface about an operation called Bishop’s Pawn. An ex-FBI agent living in Cuba wants to trade the documents for a rare coin. Cotton Malone’s first assignment with the Justice Department is to recover the coin and the files.
Justice and FBI agents, active and retired want to get their hands on the secret files. Some want to destroy them, and others want to make them public. All parties want to know what they contain, what they might reveal about the assassination.
This was a good read, bouncing around Florida, more secrets uncovered at every turn. I think it could have been told in a shorter version without losing anything. I also wonder how Malone could have people dying all around him without getting arrested or killed—not always believable. But the story was interesting enough to keep me reading to the end and the end revealed one more twist.
Devon Conner’s teenage son Tyson has run off and she’s worried that he’s into something illegal with new friends that she doesn’t approve of. She hires Elvis Cole to find him and to find out what kind of trouble he’s in. Cole finds that Tyson and his friends have been robbing homes of the very rich around Los Angeles. When Tyson’s friend Alec is murdered, Tyson and friend Amber don’t believe it. They continue to live the high life and hide from his mother.
Not only does Crais write good plots, he writes with humor and his characters are always interesting. Elvis Cole and his sidekick muscle Joe Pike have been around for many of Crais’s novels, yet they haven’t become boring. The young thieves in The Wanted have individual and credible personalities. Even the bad guys who are killing people have interests other than murder.
I’ve given up on many of the prolific authors who write series novels, but not Robert Crais. He still holds my attention.