KT, a tech journalist in Seattle receives a death threat against herself and her 13-year old daughter and calls her friend and fellow journalist June Cassidy, who immediately dispatches main squeeze ex-super soldier Peter Ash to KT’s assistance, and just in the nick of time, too.
He turned in a crouch and scrambled toward Ellie and KT, shoving his pistol into his waistband and grabbing an arm in each big hand and pulling them upright and away. Down the sidewalk he ran, towing them behind him, his instincts screaming to pull his pistol, to turn and fire, but he didn’t. He’d caused enough collateral damage in his military career, he wasn’t about to open fire after school in a family neighborhood.
The assassin, unfortunately, does not labor under such moral constraints, or any at all for that matter, and he is Legion, literally and figuratively. Peter (and June and Lewis, yay!) try to keep everyone and themselves alive long enough to find out who is shooting at them and why. They have help, including ex-vet and Peter’s fellow soldier Manny Martinez.
“I’d offer to call my guys, put a fire team together, but we’re shut down for hunting season and they’re all in Montana or Wyoming.” Most of Manny’s employees had served with Manny and Peter. They were, among other things, avid elk hunters. To Peter’s knowledge, there was no more heavily armed and dangerous group of roofers on the planet.
I think I’ve met some of those guys in Alaska, actually. Whatever, Peter and June and Lewis and Manny are hot on the trail of the Messenger, the megalomaniac behind the curtain who is calling the shots (literally in their case) because he is afraid KT has discovered what he’s up to. She hadn’t but they do.
“Some kind of end-time manifesto,” Lewis said. “Although you notice there ain’t no real mention of God or the Rapture, right? Sounds to me like they ain’t just getting ready for the Dark Time, whatever the hell that is. They gonna make it happen themselves.”
Lewis nails it, and the difficulty is that the Messenger has had years to prepare, including setting up a regular donation system for tech bros to send money to reserve them a safe place when the Dark Time comes, (Digression: I mean, how American is that? Soak the rich to exploit their perpetual paranoia over losing their billions. I laughed out loud when I read that.) and Petrie has drawn a perfect portrait of one of them.
She’d emailed Boxall three times, requesting an interview. He’d finally responded with a two-word, all-caps reply, “FUCK OFF.” Very on-brand for a tech bro, she thought…His social media was full of pictures of his fitness regimen ad his Tesla Cybertruck. Unsurprisingly, there appeared to be no wife or girlfriend…Troy Boxall wore tight workout clothes that showed a vastly over-developed musculature. His arms were so bulked up he probably couldn’t straighten them. At twenty-nine, he already had a receding hairline.
Peter does a couple of dumb things this time out but Petrie sure makes him pay for it, although not in time to stop the Messenger from executing his Plan. For about fifteen excruciatingly well-written pages they think they have failed and that The Dark Time is truly upon them.
If humanity was at a tipping point, Peter thought, and got knocked back to the Stone Age, at least the wildlife would return. Elk and moose. Bears, mountain lions, and wolves. Birds and fish and everything else mankind had hunted almost to extinction. Without eight billion Homo sapiens, the rest of the planet would be just fine…It was about losing everything else. Going out to breakfast with friends. Dancing with June to a barroom jukebox. Seeing a movie in a crowded theater. The whole beautiful messed-up human world. Goddamn them, the Messenger and his people. How dare they end all this?
For far too long Petrie convinced me that he was switching the Peter Ash series from crime fiction to dystopia. Fear not, there is a satisfying resolution, but it’s a mark of Petrie’s talent as to just how long he makes you think it’ll never come. The ninth Peter Ash novel and the scariest yet by far, maybe because it’s just too uncomfortably close to our present day reality.
Book Review Monday Chatter Nick Petrie Peter Ash The Dark Time