Characters you'll love--others you'll hate!

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	• Silence Thomas Perry Harcourt, 2007 - 448 pages average customer review:based on 31 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Characters you'll love--others you'll hate!

Former police officer turned private investigator, Jack Till, helped restaurateur, Wendy Harper, disappear following a beating that nearly killed her. He taught her how to stay lost and avoid detection by the people who are looking for her. She was a good pupil who makes it difficult, six years later, to find her when evidence of her murder surfaces and her ex-finance, Chef Eric Fuller is arrested.

Till informs the prosecutor that Harper is alive and in hiding, but the attorney refuses to believe Jack. Unless the attorney sees Wendy with her own eyes, Fuller is going on trial for her murder.

After personal ads, placed in newspapers that Harper likes, fails to bring her forward, Till begins his hunt for the woman he carefully taught how to stay hidden. Till understands that the evidence against Fuller has been planted to draw Harper out of hiding, which means her life is still in danger.

The man who is after Harper has directed his attorney to hire a husband and wife `hit' team, Paul and Sylvie Turner. The couple kills people and then, to relax, they study ballroom dance.

Paul and Sylvie begin to track Till (through his car rentals) as he searches for Harper. Their travels take them from Las Vegas to northern California. Till stays one step ahead of the assassins, but when Till locates Harper, the stakes are raised. The case becomes messy for the professionals and Till and Harper may not make it to L.A. alive. And even if they do, people are not whom they seem to be and the most dangerous might just be those who are expected to uphold the law.

Perry is a favorite of mine. I'd read a cereal box if he wrote it. Silence is another winner in the long line of Perry winners. I loved the premise and enjoyed the fast-paced action. Till is an endearing character and one anyone would trust with their life.

While I enjoyed the back stories of the characters, I felt it was a bit too much. Less might have been more. The long drawn-out histories occasionally detracted from the action.

Armchair Interviews says: If you want thrilling action with characters you care about and dislike, Silence is a good choice.

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Misplaced Identity

Originally released in 1982, Thomas Perry's "The Butcher's Boy" became a cult classic - the tale of a steely-eyed assassin double-crossed and out for revenge. And while a couple of follow-on efforts didn't quite do it for me ("Sleeping Dogs", "Pursuit"), the cynically dark humor and credible suspense is back with full impact in "Silence", a well-crafted and highly original crime yarn proving again that when it comes to contract killers, Perry knows his craft.

Jack Till is the formulaic SoCal ex-cop making ends meet as a private detective. Six years prior, Till helped Wendy Harper, the partner in an up-and-coming LA restaurant, disappear after she barely escaped a brutal attempted murder. But now, Wendy's ex-partner Eric is indicted for her murder, framed in an apparent attempt to bring Wendy back to the surface, and Jack Till must find Wendy to prove Eric's innocence. This is no easy task since Till took extraordinary steps to hide Wendy, insuring that no one - including himself - could ever track down her new identity and secret life.

From this rather confused premise, Perry weaves an even more convoluted but well-written and gripping mystery. While Jack Till and the inevitable attraction between him and Wendy is flat and predictable, the novel's life and brilliance comes in the form of Paul and Sylvie Turner, a husband and wife hit team who when not killing are either ballroom dancing or bickering. My first reaction to this gun-slinging update of "The Bickerson's" was mild annoyance - I mean, really - "Tango with the Triggerman"? But as the story and the characters developed, the relationship between stripper-turned-porn-star-turner-killer Sylvie and stone-cold assassin Paul took on unique and darkly refreshing dimensions, upstaging the comparatively bland Till and Wendy in a move by Perry that could only have been calculated. The plot dips and twists through a few Salsa moves of its own, takes a tour through the slime and sleaze of LA's music industry, and ends up with a few surprises and a satisfying wrap up, leaving at least one reader hoping that Perry will consider bringing back the wacky and deadly Turner duo for an encore.

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Page-Turners

Retired LAPD Detective, Private Investigator Jack Till helped Wendy Harper disappear six years ago after being brutally beaten and almost killed. Now her ex-boyfriend is charged with her murder so Jack must find Wendy so an innocent man doesn't pay for a crime he didn't commit. There are two big problems. One is that Jack doesn't know where Wendy is after teaching her how to disappear. Problem two is the husband/wife professional hit-team of Paul and Sylvie Turner have a contract to kill Wendy and they are good at their job.

I really love the Jane Whitfield series by Thomas Perry so I had some expectations starting this novel. I'm happy to say that most of my expectations were met. The story is well-paced with a mostly suspenseful plot. The ease in which the Turners followed Jack to Wendy seemed a bit of a plot weakness. As for characters, I really liked Jack Till and hope more time is spent on character development if this turns into a series. I would be great if his Down-Syndrome daughter would become part of the story.

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Silence

I am fan of Thomas Perry and this is his worst work. That said it was still a fun read. His usually brilliant character development stuttered out between the irony of Metzger"s Dog and the depth of revelation of the Jane Whitfield series. His focal character Jack Till leads the hack assasins by nose leaving mayhem in their wake and never catches on. The resoluton is so weak as to make me wonder whether I had just read an intended farce or a failed thriller. Don't read this Perry novel as your introduction to an otherwise fine author.

Till death do us part!

HA! What a riot, the last chapter is the best one. The whole book is good, it's fast, and spaces the "need to know" points out enough to keep you guessing. I'd read another Thomas Perry book, better then what I thought it was going to be.

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reviews: 1, page 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7

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