Review: The Assassins by Gayle Lynds, read by Kate Reading
Gayle Lynds is the New York Times Best-selling and Award Winning author of The Book of Spies and The Last Spymaster thriller / espionage novels. She wrote alongside one of my favorite authors, Robert Ludlum, before he passed away in the early 2000’s and that’s how I’ve discovered her. Now, with The Assassins, she returns with another unputdownable action packed thriller featuring some old and much loved characters from The Book of Spies a.k.a The Library of Gold.
The Assassins opens in 2003 with six of the most feared freelance special operators in the world robbing a museum in Iraq, hoping to get there collective hands on a historical artifact worth probably billions of dollars. The well planned job goes to hell, because of betrayal in there midst, and the artifact is shattered and presumed lost.
Fast forward 10 years as Judd Ryder, one of the many characters we’ve meet first in The Book of Spies, returns home to find that someone had been impersonating him and living in his house. Then, when the legit Judd tries to confront the impostor, the man is assassinated by a hit and run snowmobile right in front of him. This action puts in motion a series of events that will carry Judd and his close friend Eva Blake on a thrilling journey around the world.
You can experience The Assassins as a standalone book, but fans of Gayle’s that have read The Book of Spies will be very happy to reunite with some old acquaintances like the elusive assassin know as The Carnivore, the couple mentioned above and others… I’m vague for a good reason, I hate spoilers and as you well know, I prefer that you discover an excellent plot on your own, without me ruining it for you, like so many ”great” reviewers do very often.
The Assassin’s is brilliantly written and the story is very well thought out, filled with great characters and exotic locations. The action moves at breakneck speeds from the bullets ridden streets of Bagdad, Iraq to Washington D.C in the US, to the old city of London, UK and to the hustle and bustle of Marrakesh, Marocco in North Afrika.
Be warned! If you start The Assassins you won’t be able to put it down or to stop listening. There is never a dull moment or a second to take a breath. Gayle Lynds is a master at this game, she writes like Robert Ludlum and Vince Flynn, delivering one of the best Spy novels of 2015.
The audio version of The Assassins is performed by Kate Reading and she does a great job with it. Kate brings Judd, Eva, The Carnivore and many more characters to life using unique voices and accents, keeping them differentiated in the listeners mind, while infusing even more intensity into an already very fast paced and entertaining story. I noticed that Kate Reading is the female narrator of choice for all the books written by Gayle Lynds and I am very pleased with this decision, since I consider her to be one of the best feminine voices in the Audiobook Industry.
I still need to get my hands on Masquerade and The Coil to be able to say that I’ve read all Gayles’s works, but I’ll do that in the near future. For now, I hope that Gayle is hard at work on her next novel!
Ladies, Thank you for the entertainment!
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The Assassins
Written by: Gayle Lynds
Narrated by: Kate Reading
Length: 12 hrs and 41 mins
Unabridged Audiobook
Release Date:06-30-15
Publisher: Blackstone Audio, Inc.
Download Audiobook Get Kindle Get Audio CD Get Hardcover Get Paperback
Publisher’s Summary
In 2003, in the chaos surrounding the Iraq War and the fall of Baghdad, a team of top freelance assassins infiltrates and then escapes the country with a near priceless treasure. Since then there’s been barely a whisper of a rumor of those men, the treasure, and what it actually means.
A decade later Judd Ryder returns to the DC area from a covert operation in Iraq to see his doppelganger across the street, a man who is wearing his clothes, living in his house, and pretending to be him. Just as he’s about to confront him, Ryder watches as his double is killed in an all-too-convenient car accident. Not only was someone pretending to be him, someone else wanted to kill him.
As he soon learns, the key to all of this is a legendary Cold War freelance assassin known as the Carnivore. Ryder and his colleague, Eva Blake, were the last two people known to have had contact with him. Now someone is trying to use them to lure the Carnivore out of retirement or hiding, wherever he might be. At stake appears to be a treasure of unimaginable value. And the players are the most dangerous freelancers on the world stage.
Now Ryder and Blake must use every resource at their disposal to outmaneuver the forces allied against them, stay alive, and, if possible, uncover the truth that lurks in the shadows of this deadly game of assassins.
©2015 Gayle Lynds (P)2015 Blackstone Audio, Inc.
Victor Dima
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