Book Review: Rain Storm

I just finished reading the third John Rain thriller, Rain Storm. I'm getting tired of saying this, but I love these books. They are terrific thrillers and I think I've said it before, its so rare to read a good thriller that's written in the first person.

In this story, John Rain is found in Brazil, by the CIA, and begin working for them again. He meets up with another assassin who is trying to get to the same target he is after, and she happens to be a beautiful blonde (how prosaic). This was a bit of a surprise from Barry Eisler. He's full of formulaic characters, but for the most part he avoids patently obvious formulas. The girl in this was a bit too obvious, particularly when the love interest in the past two have been so deeply fleshed out and different. Viva la difference, Barry!

Despite this, the story is a fast one to read and spectacularly engaging. There were a couple of terrific passages and vocabulary, as usual, which I marked, also as usual.

Atavism: Relating to or characterized by reversion to something ancient or ancestral.

Senescent: The condition or process of deterioration with age.

Like Goldfinger, a lot of the first part of the story is wrapped up in gambling. I found some of these intriguing.

"We moved with them, past gamblers flush with fresh winnings, whome the girls eyed with bold invitation, eager to retrieve a few floating scraps from the casino food chain; pas middle-aged men from Hong Kong and Taiwan with sagging bodies and febrile eyes, their postures rigid, caught in some grim purgatory between sexual urgency and commercial calculation; past security guards, inured to the charms of the girls' bare legs and bold decolletage and interested only in keeping them moving, circling, forever swimming through the murk of the endless Lisboa night."

When I got to this section of the story I actually went back and read some of Casino Royale for it's terrific description of baccarat.

"I played baccarat at the upscale Bellagio; roulette at the off-strip Rio; craps at the fading Riviera, whose attempts to match the gayness and glitter around her felt forced, artificial, like makeup layered on by a woman who recognizes that she was never beautiful to begin with and has now, in addition, grown colorless an old."

I liked the way he made the tide sound like a defeated army.

"The rain had stopped and we strolled down to the edge of the water. The tide was receding, giving up wet sand like a defeated army abandoning terrain it could no longer control."

I thought it was interesting that he referenced Ian Fleming in the book, and right after I used him as a reference.

"What did Ian Fleming say? Once is happenstance, twice is coincidence, three times is enemy action. And I don't believe in waiting for even that much evidence. It was pas time to act."

Finally, I loved the metaphor using the umbrellas.

"From Narita, I took a Narita Express train to Tokyo station, where I emerged to find my former city hunched up against characteristically rainy and cold late autumn weather. I stood under the portico roof at the station's Marunouchi entrance and took in the scene. Waves of black umbrellas bobbed before me. Wet leaves were plastered to the pavement, ground in by the tires of oblivious cars and the soles of insensate pedestrians, by the weight of the entire, indifferent metropolis."

A strong and fun book, as fun as the last two. I look forward to the next.