Day Of Reckoning : Book

Jack Higgins's Fox is a Mafioso of the new breed--well-spoken, cultured, a war hero--but prepared to kill on reflex. When Fox kills a woman journalist for spying on his affairs, he omits to check out her past; her ex-husband, Blake Johnson, a security adviser to the President, swears bloody vengeance on him and is joined by his friends, notably Sean Dillion, the former IRA enforcer, in a crusade to humiliate Fox before killing him."We take this animal out, only we do it my way. It's too easy to shoot him on the street. I want this to be slow and painful. We destroy his miserable little empire bit by bit until he has nothing left. And then we destroy him."In a sequence of short episodes, each of Fox's enterprises--a London casino, a deal with the Army of God over uranium-tipped missiles, a diamond heist, arming IRA holdouts against the peace process--is taken away from him; we know, though, from the start, that the final reckoning is still to come, and that Blake will find himself Fox's prisoner in the waterlogged cellars of a Cornish castle ... Higgins has a formula down pat, and will never disappoint his myriad fans. We get a lot of technical details about just how to blow up a ship or crack a safe, and a group of adventurers whose utter ruthlessness goes along with sentiment and loyalty. This is the mixture as before, efficiently done. --Roz KaveneyRead More