So, I was sitting on my only piece of furniture a couple months ago, after having just finished my last 11 beers from the fridge and was waiting on the sweet release of death (or at least my bladder), when I thought to myself. “Millinial, you gorgeous, intelligent, inspiring portrait of masculinity, you, you should buy that guy’s book that makes all the funny YouTube videos and read it. Surely, the man who goes rock climbing, owns a kilt, lives in a far off land, and wears aviators while he drinks can write a compelling story worthy of at least 4 fewer nights of self-loathing on your Farming Simulator”. So I did. It took long enough for the book to get here. Likely, due to the [UNSPECIFIED VIRUS FROM UNKNOWN ORIGIN], but alas, it finally arrived. I could barely contain my anticipation as I raced from the mailboxes, past my expectant landlord, to my aging Sedan, driving down three complexes and, finally, up to my apartment, where I tore into the package only to find that the previous owner of my edition had treated it much like I’d imagine Ike did Tina when the steak was over-cooked. No matter! All the pages were in-tact and the words were small enough for me to understand I spent the next 4 nights thumbing through the pages with my tear-soaked fingers and now it’s time for a review. So shimmy out of your cargo pants, plug in your favorite off-brand air freshener, pour yourself some water from the tap and let’s dive right in, shall we!
Redemption is the first in a series of novels about a CIA agent named Ryan Drake. Drake is a limey Brit. After spending some time serving with the red coats, and having an auspicious exit, he earns the respect and admiration of a high-powered branch of the CIA responsible to deploying ‘Shephard’ units; elite investigative teams intent on ‘finding people that don’t want to be found’. Will utilizes a ‘Frame Story’ technique, so in the beginning, we get a brief look at Drake lying on a Tarmac about to die; a scene that we will, presumably, work up toward. After this the actual story starts with a glimpse into a command center of some sort, responsible for operating the drones over Iraq. And wouldn’t ya know it, one of the drones shoots a civilian (sounds familiar). And not just one, a whole slew of them. When one of their drones goes temporarily offline, picture returns to reveal devastation from the blast to all of the suits in Washington. The entire side of a building has been destroyed, people are dead, and it’s all over the news. It’ll be hard to get lipstick on this pig. Whatever will they do? Cue the CIA.
Our introduction to Drake comes as he’s about to receive his next assignment. It is here that we are dangled the carrot of his sordid past. Drake has been with ‘the agency’ for years but you get the sense that he would rather be back in his fatigues if not for something awful that happened during his service that led to a dishonorable discharge. Drake would do anything to wipe this mysterious deed from his ledger so he hardly bats an eye when his boss, Franklin, tells him that he has 4 days to assemble a team and retrieve a valuable asset, code name Maras(God of War), from an isolated Russian prison in Kytvardkxsdtwzistan. So, Drake assembles the Justice Lea—oh wait, no—… Drake assembles The Mighty Avenge—oh, sorry not that either… Oceans Eleve—no? Damn! Ok, Drake assembles his…Shephard Team?(Not as bad ass of name if you ask me) No matter! Much like all elite teams, he has his tech guy(er girl) Frost, his Sniper, Keegan, his 2nd in command, ummm… and his bitter adversary, Dietrich; the man he’d just as soon throw a brick to if he was drowning in the ocean, but needs for his certain set of skills on this mission.
At the same time that the X-Force are being assembled, we’re introduced to the great Anya, code named Maras, as she endures a brutal existence in one of Russia’s most abysmal prisons. A place where even the guards are not allowed to leave and the whole thing appears to be one step below Hell on Earth. If you were wondering whether the females in Will’s book were going to be strong and brave, you need not wait long. Before you’ve even let out the first belch from your 12-pack, we see Maras banging out more pushups than I’ve done since the week I did Crossfit. We’re told how she’s endured poor living conditions, awful food, torture, rape, and, thanks to her feisty persona, she spends all of her days in solitary confinement. We are led to believe that she is not only the toughest woman we will ever read about, but the toughest human being in the history of the world. Nay, the universe! We find out why as the story goes but, damn man, the only way to beat the reader more over the head with how strong she is would have been to just say “She’s Thor if he was a Terminator and married to Meghan Markle” We Get It! She’s tough!
Anyway, Hogan’s Heroes come up with a plan to parachute into the prison from a very high altitude 5 miles away as to avoid encroaching Russian air space. From there, they will Ethan Hunt their way through the prison to find Maras and rappel down the prison wall to a chopper waiting outside the prison once they escape. Originally designed to be a covert mission, wouldn’t ya know that all hell breaks loose when the drug addicted Dietrich fails to secure a radio from one of the incapacitated guards. So, in the process of their escape Dietrich takes a shot through his leg and in the body armor to which Drake is forced to lug around his greatest adversary throughout the prison while Mighty Maras would rather leave him to die. Luckily, they kill enough guards and stir up enough prisoners to make their escape but not before the guy Drake picked to be his number 2 gets shot in the shoulder (this leads to his early exit from the book when he goes on the mend, and the reason I cannot remember his name).
The action in this book is good. You can tell he went through the trouble of educating himself on weaponry and terminology (something he doesn’t let you forget) but Jeepers the details get a bit out of control! I know that novelists have a tendency to get longwinded (they can use 50 words to describe the splotch I have on my back) but Will goes overboard. This book is 549 pages, but would be 350 if we didn’t have to read exactly how the hair fell in everyone’s face every page, or in what condition every structure or piece of furniture “must have been in 10 years ago,” or the shape of everyone’s muscles before during and after they wipe their ass. I get that imagery is an important part of a story. But I felt like the attempts at painting a picture occasionally took me out of the story. I found myself having to go back and re-read what was actually going on before I was hit with a paragraph describing the same plain white T-shirt and shape of her jaw that I read 10 pages ago.
Anyway, they break Mara out and head back to the states. Drake’s boss and his boss’s boss, Cain(remember that name, it’ll be important later), are unable to make a connection with Maras to get the information they need, so they reach back out to Drake with hopes that he can “connect” with her (if you know what I mean). Drake convinces the Goddess of War to cooperate with the Agency but now he must be the one to accompany her through the assignment. And just as he’s about to escort her across town, to get on a plane, he gets a call on his phone. It seems that the man who was blackmailing the agency in order to break Maras out of prison now has Drake’s sister and is threatening to kill her unless Drake breaks Maras free from CIA custody and meets him at a yet-to-be determined location sometime in the near future.
So, Drake must now wave bye-bye to all of the ‘redemption’ he’d hoped to receive through the wiping of his dirty deeds because now he’s got to save his sister. He escapes custody with the prisoner and heads to a parking garage where Munro has a car waiting for him to flee from the CIA. And it is here that episode 2 of Ryan Drake begins.
One of the things I liked about this book was the attempted old school style of pacing. Frankly, it’s a quality of military books in general that had me longing for the days of my Tom Clancy obsession. Rather than jumping from action scene to action scene, with next to zero character development or dramatic build-up, these books almost always involve a methodical (albeit a little too methodical for this book) march toward a climax that allows readers to feel the buildup and gives more legitimacy to the heightened stakes of the story.
Anyway, Drake and Maras are on the run and it’s up to The A Team to track them down. The team that Drake had assembled to break Maras out of prison, lead by his nemesis, Dietrich, would now be hunting for him through the American Southeast. The next few chapters were spent establishing a connection between Drake and his broken companion, as well as some impeccable detective work by his former team.
It’s here that I find one flaw with the plot. We see the intelligence of this elite CIA team throughout the chase; whether it’s scouring the cameras in town to locate their escape vehicle, tracking down the store that sold their GPS unit in order to locate them, accessing the bus schedules at an air port in order to narrow down possible escape options, or predicting Drakes prediction of predictability(uhh…). The assumption is that Drake has gone rogue and is, now, working for the bad guys. But why, with all the intelligence and history of the Expendables and their leader, Franklin, wouldn’t they have considered the fact that Drake may have been compromised by a threat to his family. I mean, all of these agents have known Drake for years as a man of impeccable character and dogged obedience. It only makes sense that any nefarious behavior may, likely, be the result of a personal threat to someone he loves. And with a miniscule amount of social connections, it would’ve been easy to locate his only living family member and discover that she’d been taken. Instead, they prattle on for the next 20 chapters just assuming he’s flipped to the dark side. Ahhh, what ever.
The middle of the book unfolds about as you’d expect. A ‘by the numbers’ game of cat and mouse where we see Drake and Maras (now going by Anya) keep running into road blocks and escaping them just in time to evade their would-be captors, on their way to Saudi Arabia where the baddy, Munro, wants Anya to re-connect with her contact from 4 years ago when she was working on a mission in Iraq. Leading up to the Iraq war, Maras had been working on an operation that proved the existence of Saddam’s alleged ‘Weapons of Mass Destruction’ and whatever ever Munro needs is tied up in it. Throughout the pursuit, we are bombarded with just how badass this badass from Badassville is. Not only does Anya still have hideouts of cash and weapons to access, break the arm of a jacked up “toxic male” at a gas station(ugh…), and always have the best ideas before the thick-skulled Brit(Drake) does, but she also sleeps ON THE FLOOR! What? I could accept that this gorgeous assassin was the best at everything she put her mind to, but letting Drake have the bed in a fleabag hotel while she sleeps on the floor? I’m not buying it.
Anyway, after escaping to Saudi Arabia with one of Anya’s old passports and one stolen from a skeevy businessman that Anya lures into a hotel room with her ‘sexuality’ (Gasp!), they set off to make contact with one of her old resources that will help them get across the border of Iraq and meet her contact, if he still exists. Meanwhile, their pursuers make contact with the toxic male businessman and are hot on their tail. And things are about to get….uh….interesting?
While resting up for a middle-of-the-night border crossing at the house of her old friend, Hussam, the Shephard team finally catches up to them. Suddenly, the sound of a Black Hawk helicopter signals the arrival of Dietrich and his crew. In a huff, Hussam ushers Drake and Anya to his basement where he has access to a tunnel system that will help them escape. On foot, Drake and Anya travel through the tunnels, while the CIA unit storms the house, and they pop out of the tunnels into a garage with a getaway vehicle that Hussam kept stashed for emergency purposes.
Here we’re informed of the continued air surveillance of the Black Hawk Helicopter that brought the team in. This, coupled with the fact that Dietrich had sniffed out their probable exit location, and now had Drake at gunpoint in the garage, surely meant that Bonnie and Clyde’s time was up. Certainly, even if they were to escape the garage with all of their limbs, the helicopter outside would have no trouble tracking them no matter where they’d go.
But fret not, you logical, pragmatic, observer of circumstances, you, for all it would take is a couple minutes of the Mighty Anya fighting in the dark to bust them from the garage and be on the road in no time. What happened to the helicopter that was just there a second ago and was, likely converging on their location to haul them away? Don’t knoowww! Why wouldn’t the rest of the team continue pursuit of them once word got out where they were located? Don’t knoowww! After building the stakes to immeasurable proportions, Drake and Anya’s escape was, as Screen Rant would say “Super easy, barely and inconvenience.”
And now that the dynamic duo are back on the road, it’s time to remind us that Dietrich is a bad guy, again. Dejected by Drake and Anya’s escape, they return to Hussam’s house to question him about where his guests were going, We are then treated to Dietrich performing a fake execution of Hussam’s son in order to get him to give up the goods. And it works?! Damn, man! I’m pretty sure that the first thing I’d do after watching a man kill my son would be assume that we were all fucked anyway and go nuts on the guy. Suicide at the hand of my captors would be the obvious choice. I certainly wouldn’t give him the information he was seekin, thus making my son’s death in vain. Ahh, what evar!
Honestly, I didn’t see the point of any of the events at Hussam’s house. It didn’t add anything of value to the story. Anya’s a super-soldier—we know, Dietrich is a prick—we know, when it’s all said and done Drake and Anya are still on the run and the team is still chasing them. If anything, it served as a regression in Dietrich’s character arc, not to mention the unexplainable disappearance of a Black Hawk helicopter! He could’ve easily just had Drake and Anya escape, the team show up, get the information from Hussam, and continue on their merry way, like they do anyway. Perhaps the whole thing was contrived to create some tension for Drake and Anya’s sex scene(atta boy!) that follows shortly after but jeepers, it could’ve been done much bettar.
Anyway, after the escape (and the sex) Will points us toward a climax(no pun intended) as they finally arrive at their destination; a remote cave in Southwestern Iraq, where they meet Anya’s old contact, Zebari. Zebari breaks the news to them that the Weapons Of Mass Destruction she was trying to locate all those years ago were never actually purchased. Iraq was trying to acquire them, but the shit hit the fan before they ever had the chance. This spelled doom for Drake and Anya’s prospects until they realized that the would-be sellers of the nuclear and chemical weapons all those years ago was….wait for it…none other than Uncle Sam himself! The grand ole U.S. of A. were the ones trying to sell the WMD the whole time! Turns out, they needed Iraq to be in possession of WMD to justify the invasion of their country(how’d that work out?) so they were trying to sell them to them through a front group.
Ok, I gotta admit. This was a pretty entertaining twist. I mean, setting aside the anti-American sentiment that infects any discussion of that conflict and the mis-characterized and revisionist view of nearly every Mid-East conflict, this was, at least, done in an entertaining way. A false flag operation in Iraq leading up to the war is intriguing stuff. It wouldn’t wholly negate the culpability of the Iraqis and would still put most of the blame where all the lefties want in this country want it; the United States. Perhaps we could all agree on a scenario like this as some type of national compromise and put the issue to bed forever. A guy can dream!
Anyway, after the big reveal, we are re-visited by another of America’s great sins; Drone Missiles. Out of nowhere Drake and Anya’s vehicle is struck and it leaves our protagonists haggard and weak. Easy prey for a black ops unit that shows up to whisk them away to an old abandoned air strip where Munro is, apparently, waiting for them.
Meanwhile, our Super Squad, who have been using the GPS frequency from Drake and Anya’s navigation system to track them, are being fucked with. Their boss, Franklin, has been instructed to have his team stand down by his boss, Cain. Confused by the sudden order to pump the breaks with their target in their grasps, Dietrich must decide whether to defy orders and continue across the Iraq border, or call it a day and head home. Franklin senses that something is amiss.
Back at the airfield, Munro finally makes his physical debut. Drake and Anya, punctured and worn, are drug before him where the rest of the reveal will occur. His intent is to kill anyone that knows about the foiled arms deal but first, as all great villains do, he must go about narrating every detail of his actions leading up to this point, and everything he will do afterwards. We get some background on Munro and Anya’s history in The Agency and we find out that he is working with…dum dum dum…Cain! (Wouldn’t ya know it. The man responsible for the entire operation is the big baddy) Cain was the man behind the attempted arms deal and he’s trying to clean it up. He used Munro as his proxy to break Anya out of prison in order to track down anyone with knowledge of the old WMD op and dispense of them. He his trying to elevate his position in the Agency for a potential foray into politics and needs to tie up loose ends. So there we have it. Another tragedy as a result of one man’s blind ambition.
Next, we get an homage (ripoff?) of Die Hard With a Vengence. Remember the part in that movie when Bruce and Sammy L are tied up on top of those containers and were, seemingly, out of options. Destined to be blown to bits and sink to the bottom of the ocean with the rest of the “gold” from the Federal Reserve, only to be saved by a piece of wire that was lodged in Bruce’s shoulder that he used to pick the hand cuffs that were holding him? Well, swap out the wire with ‘shrapnel from the cave explosion’ and you now know how Anya escapes her cuffs to save the day. Luckily, Dietrich had made the decision to defy orders and was approaching the airstrip in a Helo just in time to provide the distraction Drake and Anya needed to escape Munro’s grip.
Unfortunately, after fleeing the scene of his foiled villain monologue, Munro has notified Cain of the situation and, as a final recourse, Cain has decided to drone strike the entire air strip. With everyone he needs dead in one location, a short phone call to a drone operator will take care of all his problems. What a moron that Munro is. Surely, he had to suspect that Cain would consider killing him once he took care of Anya in the first place. Now that the whole operation had gone tits up, he had to know that Cain would result to a nuclear option.
Anyway, the drone hijacking from the beginning of the book had been carried out from this same airfield so the technology needed to thwart Cain’s current drone capabilities is right at their fingertips. Dietrich and Frost take care of the drone, Anya goes after Munro and Drake goes after Anya.
The action wraps up with Anya and Munro’s final fight; hand to hand combat. Despite the hole in her side from the missile at the cave, and the fact that Munro knows all of her fighting tendencies (she trained him), The War Queen is able to fend off Munro and send him running. Munro flees in a vehicle from the strip only catch the business end of a re-directed drone missile that Dietrich and Frost had commandeered.
Having showed up in time to witness the end of the fight, Drake beckons with Anya not to run off. He wants her to stay with him so they can hunt down Cain (among other things), but Anya cannot be tamed. She shoots him in the gut, making sure not to damage anything important, and leaves him to be scooped up by the rest of his team while she takes off (a scene we are given at the very beginning of the book).
The book ends with Cain weaseling his way into his elevated position at The Agency, Franklin occupying Cain’s old position, and the Shephard team being made to accept the whole ordeal as merely ‘part of the job’. An ending, no doubt, necessary to set up the rest of the books in the series.
So, there you have it. The first commercial success of everyone’s favorite intoxicated YouTuber. All joking aside, I enjoyed the book. It was a book that was, obviously, a product of it’s time, and I suspect may be a little different if it were made today. Will Jordan clearly spent a great deal of time and attention on the details of his story; character appearance, plot details, environmental factors..etc. In general, the story reads as a prototypical spy thriller with plenty of red meat for those looking for an old fashioned, action-packed romp through the world of governmental corruption and career ambition. As is common with these types of stories, we are called to ponder on the ideas of honor, decency, human suffering, moral ambiguity, cooperation through conflict and, of course, redemption. I look forward to the next edition (if the wankers from across the pond ever take a sabbatical from their tea and ‘biscuits’ long enough to ship it to me).
As far as my issues with the book, I’ve already noted them above(albeit, in an exaggerated fashion). Jordan’s ‘over-description’ of things in the book did seem to thin out, a bit, as the book went along, but still gave the story a bit of a wooden feeling, at times, and slowed the pace. They struck me as a new author attempting to cross every T and dot every I to establish his legitimacy as a story-teller. The plot issues were, mostly, innocuous. It had more than enough originality and plot coherence to cut the mustard (Especially compared to the story-telling of 2021).
Probably my only major annoyance was with the main character of the book. And make no mistake, it was Ms. War Queen, herself, Anya. I couldn’t help but keep drifting back to the movie, Mad Max Fury Road when thinking about her character. In that movie, Charlize Theron’s character becomes the main focus of the film, while Mad Max rides shotgun. Similarly, Anya dominates this book. There’s no man or woman she can’t handle or situation she can’t manage. The brutal nature of her life experience and her temperament often came into conflict with the more sensitive side of the character that Will tried to portray. When you spend several pages going on about child molestation, stabbings, prison rape, and cold-blooded murder, it’s a little difficult to swallow her having much compassion for Drake and his feelings. I appreciated the effort, it just felt like the balance was too heavily tilted to be realistic.
Drake, for his part, waivers somewhere between ineffectual and mildly competent throughout the book. He’s battling his own inner-demons and, no doubt, has an intriguing story to tell. But we don’t get much of it. He’s from England, he’s got a sister with a family, and he’s battling alcoholism. That’s all we really get. This didn’t bother me too much, knowing that I have several more books in the series to flesh him out, but I can imagine it would’ve stuck in my crawl had I read the book when it first come out; not knowing if there would be another or not. Despite the fact that the big reveal of his dark past seemed to fall flat when compared to all of the other moral atrocities of the book, we are led to believe that there is more to be told about his checkered history. I can’t wait to read it. That’s all I’ve got for today. Go away now!
AgingMillenial 