Afterburn Book

Harrison's fourth thriller follows on from the acclaim bestowed on Break and Enter, Bodies Electric and Manhattan Nocturne, and continues the vein of modern noir established in those books: a tough man vulnerable only to the charms of a tougher femme fatale, a world where the sex is lubricious, the violence shocking and visceral, and the lure of power and money ubiquitous.Afterburn follows the fatal intertwining of three lives: Charlie Ravich, a Vietnam vet turned multimillionaire businessman, who is seeking a woman to bear the male heir; Christina Welles, fresh out of prison and relying on her high intelligence to evade the mob who have engineered her release; and Rick Bocca, Christina's ex-lover, who walked away while she was imprisoned and now is trying to save her. Each of them, true to the genre, has a past that hangs over them with an almost fatalistic aura of incipient tragedy.Harrison has constructed a brutally efficient and vivid thriller, but what stands out most are the passages where detailed research dovetails with the author's noir- ish imagination: the account of Charlie's capture and torture in Vietnam, the machinations of high-level business negotiations, the sickeningly inventive interrogation techniques of a medically inclined mobster.The book's epigraph quotes Jean-Paul Sartre on the psychology of torture: equally pertinent would have been Sartre's observation that we are defined ultimately by our actions. The three main characters in Afterburn are all faced with their own "moment of truth"--or Sartre's famous quote that "Hell is other people". In the corrupt inferno of Harrison's New York, that would be all too apt. --Burhan TufailRead More