Saturday, February 6, 2010

Book Review: The Gentle Assassin

The Gentle Assassin by William Rogers

What a pleasant surprise! When I requested The Gentle Assassin to review from I Just Finished, it sounded kind of interesting. With a blurb that says "Deep in the Nevada Desert, ex-CIA Agent Nathan Bitterroot is about to embark on the most daring mission of his life", and mentions his brilliant scientist nephew, time travel, a mysterious crystal, and Nathan's "burning desire" to settle an old score". Yeah, it sounded interesting.

Then I saw the cover in-person. Okay, I admit it, I do often tend to literally judge a book by its cover. This book is a good example of why I shouldn't. I put off reading this book for a few weeks mostly because of the cover. The cover shows a boy, maybe a 13-year old, with a broken arm, holding a revolver in his good hand pointed at the reader. His image seems Photoshopped onto a boring blue and white light that seems to be radiating from directly behind him, which is then placed onto the main black background of the book cover.

The boring cover does not affect the story though. Nathan Bitterroot, surrogate father to his scientist nephew Scott who seems to have discovered the ability for a person to travel in time back into his own consciousness, and an assortment of other friends attempt a time travel mission for Nathan to avenge the death of his father at the hands of the Las Vegas mafia.

The act of time travel, though, has unintended, far-reaching consequences for everyone involved. The book ends with another unexpected time-travel event.

There's more to the story, and a surprising narrator to parts of the story that I really want to mention but I think doing so would spoil the surprise.





Disclaimer of Disclaiming: Sometimes publishers or authors give me their book or product free so I can review it. I got this one from IJustFinished. Sometimes I get books I want to read for my own enjoyment from PaperBackSwap. The product links in the reviews take you to Amazon.com, where if you buy the linked item I get a very small percentage of the purchase price (because I like cash).

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