The Fireman (Stephen Leather Thrillers)

Rating:
Summary: For Sis
Review: Of the many thrillers by Stephen Leather, I've read to date only THE CHINAMAN, THE STRETCH, PAY OFF, and this, THE FIREMAN, so my opinion of him as an author is still evolving. And I have six more of his books lined up on the shelf to read, with many more on my wish list.

Like the previous three, the theme of THE FIREMAN is revenge. As in PAY OFF, the reader never learns the protagonist's name. In this case, he's a correspondent for a London rag - let's call him "Bob" - who learns that his sister Sally, a freelance journalist, has taken a dive off a Hong Kong high-rise. Was it suicide or murder? Traveling to the Crown Colony - the book was first published in 1989, eight years before Red China took over the property - Bob is convinced she was murdered. Now, he's got to find out why and even the score.

Stephen Leather was himself a writer for Hong Kong's "South China Morning Post". His familiarity with the city shows and provides an ambience to the plot that's perhaps the book's best feature. Unfortunately, there's not the same cleverness that I admired in THE STRETCH, where the protagonist is the wife of a British underworld boss forced to take over the business when Hubby is put behind bars, or THE CHINAMAN, where the hero is a Vietnamese immigrant to the UK out to exact vengeance on the IRA for a London bomb that caught his daughter in the collateral damage. THE FIREMAN reads more like a mediocre detective story. Only on page 192, when the reader becomes privy to an unsuspected aspect of Bob's relationship with Sis, did I do a mental double-take and think "Say, what!?" But Leather never develops this surprise further, and his hero eventually marches to the volume's conclusion never seeming as truly driven as he should be under the circumstances, and the ending was curiously flat.

I gather that THE FIREMAN was one of the author's earlier works. While I might have given it four stars in a vacuum, in comparison with the other three, especially THE CHINAMAN and THE STRETCH, three is max.