The latest thriller from veteran suspense writer Lysaght (The Eye of the Beholder) is a distressing step backward, a hybrid of mismatched genre clichés. His tale of ex-pugilist foster brothers Thomas Boyle, a cop, and Miguel Meza, a hitman, who spring into action when their beloved mentor and surrogate father "Patsy" De Marco is murdered, unsatisfyingly cobbles together political thriller, police procedural and Mafia drama. Although fast-moving and never dull, Lysaght's ungainly narrative also manages to be blunt, unsophisticated and vaguely misogynistic. Almost nothing is left to the reader's imagination; as soon as we are introduced to the novel's chief villain, a supercilious ice-queen assassin named Alicia Kent, we're informed that she is "deeply evil." Kent, a key member of the inanely named Kensington Dining Council (which seems to have nonironically modeled itself after James Bond's old archenemy, S.P.E.C.T.R.E.), is directly responsible for De Marco's death. She kills the old boxing trainer because he's stumbled across a Paterson, N.J., warehouse where the council secreted a cache of deadly sarin nerve gas, with the aid of local mob boss Angelo Bracca. After De Marco's body is found at the bottom of a waterfall, the hot-tempered Boyle and nonchalant Meza team up to avenge his death. Along the way, they exchange good-natured taunts, encounter beautiful naval intelligence officer Stephanie Shane and cause a not inconsiderable amount of property damage. They're also greeted by laughably gratuitous female nudity at every turn (Shane gets most of her clothing torn off in the novel's climactic action sequence), one of many indications that the book has more in common with tacky, exploitative B-movies than with solid suspense fiction. (Dec.)
