Saturday, September 24, 2011

The Lonely Mile - By Allen Leverone




I’m a sort of bookworm, so I have many favorite genres and authors, of the past and of the present. To mention a couple, just to stay with The Lonely Mile genre, Alistair McLean and David Baldacci.
This novel was a very nice surprise to me, because it reaches those same levels of tension and has the same fast pace, hooking the reader from the very beginning and managing in just a short chapter to create an atmosphere of anguish, terror and suspense that will underlie the whole story.
As it often happens in both McLean’s and Baldacci’s novels, the main character, Bill Ferguson, is not some superhuman secret agent or detective, he is just a normal man, with a normal family and a normal life, who suddenly finds himself dragged in a nightmarish situation just because he simply could not let a young girl to be kidnapped under his nose without doing anything.
In many ways, he is much more of a hero than all those very qualified agents and detectives we find elsewhere, just because he never expected to become one.
And his enemy, his nemesis, whose plans he has thwarted, is in its own right a much more original “bad guy” than those we usually find in thrillers.
There isn’t much more I can say without spoiling the story. I can add, however, that Leverone ability emerges not only in the way he depicts his character, but also in his building of the plot, apparently very simple but very much misleading in its simplicity, just as in the best McLean novels.
Definitely, in my opinion, a five star novel no lover of the genre can bypass without reading.

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