Months like this one make it tricky to continue my required monthly Hard Case Crime read. I usually skip February as HCC has done a poor job of publishing Black authors. And I’ve read all the female authors they’ve so far published (precious few). And now, reading only horror for these 31 days, I’ve read all their horror reads: the Stephen Kings and Sugar Rush.
But unlike February and March, I didn’t think this month required a departure from it. So I grabbed this one because the premise sounded horrific: a man is in a cab when he’s bashed in the head. He wakes up in a hospital to find his face swaddled in bandages. The nurse tending to him is referring to him by a different name. He has no ID, he’s supposed to be back at his naval base by a certain time, he’s in pain and petrified.
Also, the cover was evocative of a horror tale: the bandaged man screaming as a woman screams next to him while a gun goes off.
It starts as horror but quickly switches to thriller and is a lot of fun, even by HCC standards. I was invested in the story about halfway through, curious to see how Hamilton was going to bring it home.
Unfortunately, the back half is loaded with a lot of exposition that dulled the thrill of those first hundred pages. There are some interesting twists but I was happy when it was done. Still clears the 4-star bar because I really enjoyed those first hundred pages. And I’ll have to look into more of Donald Hamilton’s work.