Steve Hamilton’s Exit Strategy, the second book in his Nick Mason series, begins with the kind of slam-bang bravura action sequence that we’ve come to expect before the credits in a James Bond or Bourne movie. Nick must infiltrate a heavily guarded eighty-two-story building, elude or incapacitate at least a dozen Federal Marshals, eliminate a prospective witness and then escape before the big explosion. Adding to the degree of difficulty is Nick’s reluctance to kill innocent people.
Exit Strategy is built around several expertly dramatized set pieces like this, where Nick must rub out targets who are heavily guarded by professionals on high alert. Action sequences may seem basic, but their actual execution takes a very adroit hand to delineate who is doing what to whom. You have only to read a bad thriller or watch a bad action movie (no names please) to see that pacing, sure description and accuracy are crucial, and the lack of them excruciating.
But what Exit Strategy has that many otherwise fine thrillers lack is the human element. Human beings aren’t actually killing machines, and there’s always a cost to violence, the effect of which is charted in superior crime fiction. As Nick reflects:
You kill one person, it changes you. You kill five… it’s not about changing anymore. It’s who you are.
Becoming “The Angel of Death” makes you necessarily less of a man, with the result threatening the human connections that surround us all. This interior drama is expertly painted as well, with the character and motivations of even the most despicable characters clear and credible.
Obviously, Hamilton walks a fine line in this series. Nick may be a reluctant hitman in the same way that Steve’s other series character, the beloved Alex McKnight, is a reluctant private eye, but he’s a hitman all the same. He isn’t doing these things for money or pathology or even truth, justice and the American way, but because he’s been forced into it by kingpin crime boss Darius Cole. Cole fixed it so that Nick was released early from prison, mobile but not free, and keeps him in line by threatening his family, particularly beloved daughter Adrian.
Ultimately it’s his paternal desire to see her grow up (usually from a distance) that’s his motivation to pursue an unholy trade. As the book continues he’s also motivated to seek revenge on taskmaster Cole and somehow forge the titular “exit strategy.”
The Noir is deep in this one, as the corrupt authority figures seem to outnumber the honest ones, and the police, feds and even the Army seem essentially powerless in the face of evil. And just when it seems like Nick might find his way out of his maze, there’s another turning that may leave him as trapped as before. In the hands of a lesser writer it all might get too grim, but from the gifted Steve Hamilton Exit Strategy is crime fiction of the highest quality. (Jamie)