Tobias S, Buckell, Hurricane Fever (2014)

This is a sort-of sequel to Buckell's previous spy-malarkey thriller Arctic Roll sorry, Rising (2012), which I haven't read. So, you know: I may be missing some nuances. I'm just not convinced that 'nuance' is really the name of the game, here. It's bang-bang-bang, thrills and tension, fight and flight and more fight. They call this sort of book a 'thriller' for a reason. And that reason is: Marketing. Not there there aren't some nice touches. There are. I liked the near-future globally-risen sea levels, flooded streets and hurricane afflicted Caribbean. Or CaRIB-bean, as I believe the Americans like to say. It was nice to see that part of the world treated as a proper setting, rather than just an exotic locale for incidental adventures. The story is efficiently plotted, and written with the sort of unembellished directness its genre mandates. That story concerns ex superspy 'Roo' Jones, dragged back into the 'game' after a former colleague is killed, a secret package turns up, and he's on his boat (having to babysit his teenage nephew) whilst a wonder weapon that could Destroy The World is somewhere in the offing. It's a good job Roo is on the case. All the time steering his boat to avoid the titular hurricanes. Truly, he Roo, Roo, Roos his boat.

I'm going to pause for a moment, to let the odour of that dissipate.

Right.

So, there's a lot of rapid-fire action, and some rather too neatly disposed global conspiring too. It's a spy-thriller with a strong maritime component and a dusting of near-future imaginary tech. In other words it's yet another example of the Oft-Discovered Bond Spree, from whose Bourne/No trad Le Car-Returns, and Catcher in Jack Ry-/An makes Missions quite Impossible. Not to, you know. To get carried away. *clears throat* Thus Copying doth make Cowards of us all.

My problem is generic, not specific to this novel. That problem is that certain readers, and the writers who supply them, believe that fighting is more interesting than talking, that shooting is more interesting than being, that violence is more interesting manifested physically in the outside world than internally in the psyche (indeed, who believe that the former doesn't really entail the latter at all, though the latter is where all violence actually comes to rest), that explosions are fireworks rather than massively accelerated entropy, that Bond, James Bond is better than Henry James (Henry), and in sum that characters in action are more fun than action in character. Whereas I tend to believe the exact opposite. But that only means I'm probably not the idea reviewer for this title. Which is fair enough.