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Tuesday, March 12, 2024

Review: The Recruiter by Gregg Podolski

Synopsis: An action-packed debut from Gregg Podolski, The Recruiter is a thrilling and unique adventure through the European underworld.  
When bad guys need good help, they call Rick Carter.

He’s a criminal recruiter, searching for contract killers, cyber hackers, gun smugglers, and any other assorted villains-for-hire a European crime boss might need. But, when the family he left behind in New Jersey is caught up in a client’s plot to monopolize the black market, Rick has to save them from two of his own top candidates: deadly assassins known only as Ghost and The Persian.

Fixing his own mess will require a set of skills he doesn’t have—not a problem, as finding qualified help is where he excels. But stepping into action, becoming the hero his family needs, that’s new territory. For a man who’s spent the last ten years being the best at helping the worst, this may be his last chance to do something right.

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Barely a quarter of the way in, I gave this four stars. It deserves five - what a roller-coaster ride through the murky underworld and the shady world of espionage. The bad guy is the good guy and the villains are suitably bad.

Rick Carter is a recruiter - he lines up "staff" for those who are willing to pay big bucks for a job to be done - no questions asked. However, things go a little awry (understatement) when a new client comes on the scene and makes Rick an offer he cannot refuse. Now Rick must use his skills and contacts to ensure that this new client does not achieve their end game - and it will come at a personal cost.

It is so easy to become invested in Rick's narrative as the tale rockets along - sometimes a break-neck speed - to an inevitable outcome, which is not a a tidy affair at all. The body count is high, the violence oft times gratuitous, the humour suitable dark, the undertones noirish, the action non-stop. For a first novel, the reader could not ask for anything more. Except more!

A couple of years ago, I was lucky enough to read a number of books of a similar genre (Truhen, Milford, Johnson, Holmen, Hamdy, and McDonnell). Podolski is in good company and I look forward to reading more.

Book review: Beatrice’s Last Smile: A New History of the Middle Ages - The Washington Post

Michael Dirda from The Washington Post reviews historian Mark Gregory Pegg’s book ‘Beatrice’s Last Smile’.


In “Beatrice’s Last Smile: A New History of the Middle Ages,” he [Mark Pegg] tracks these “fluctuations between the divine and the human by interweaving stories about men, women, and children living and dying between the third and the fifteenth centuries.” It’s quite a tapestry.

The book opens with the martyrdom of a 22-year-old Christian woman in 203 and ends in 1431 with the burning of Joan of Arc as a heretic. In between these two horrific events, Pegg — a professor of history at Washington University in St. Louis — relies on short biographies and dramatic anecdotes to illuminate, if only in strobe-light flashes, what many people still regard as the “Dark Ages,” a millennium of ignorance, confusion and all-encompassing religiosity.

See full review here @ The Washington Post