Plot or Premise

Colter Shaw has been poking around his father’s death from years ago and the poking has finally turned up some interesting leads as well as some nasty bad guys who would rather he either stop looking or find for them a missing secret cache of something his father hid. While playing cat and mouse, he uses a safe house that his father had set up long ago but finds someone else has been using it recently — Colter’s absent brother.

What I Liked

I had seen the TV episode where Colter reunites with his brother (the show had a different purpose / intent than the book), so I expected it to happen. And while a bit of a cliché for how it happens, it’s cool to see them together, slowly jockeying around to see how they now relate years later. His brother is a bad-ass merc, which comes in handy when the two need some backup against the big bad guys. There are two sub-plots going on simultaneously — one for a big giant plan if someone can find a missing document and one for a larger plan dealing with real-estate and forced ghettoization followed by gentrification. A little more intricate than you expect to see in your average mystery novel. The action that was a little too much in the previous novel is perfectly at home in this one.

What I Didn’t Like

The story bounces around a little too much, and some links to old cases as well as old partners seem a little contrived. Not enough to detract too far, just makes for a pacing problem when the story veers away from the main plot for too long a time occasionally.

The Bottom Line

Have you met my brother?