Blue Heat

Finished two novels over the past week. Winterton Blue, by Trezza Azzopardi, is a story set in Norfolk, England that wraps itself around the lives of two separate persons - Lewis Caine, a man torn apart by the haunting guilt over the death of his epileptic brother Wayne and his vengence-laced pursuit of Carl Finn who led Wayne to his demise; and Anna Caulder, a woman struggling to both find her own place in life and repair her relationship with her mother Rita. While the book, with all its poignant twists and exquisite character development, was just about satisfactory, I wasn't blown away by it. Perhaps it was because I just didn't buy the Lewis-Anna romance, and that may have just soured everything.

The second novel was Dead Heat, by Joel Rosenberg. Peppered with Christian theology, the story roars off to a fiery start with the American CIA launching Hellfire missiles at suspected terrorists in Yemen, and the rest of the story continues action-packed all the way through to the end, with the discovery of evidence of an assassination plot against the top US leadership; nuclear warheads vaporising entire cities from one side of the Pacific to the other; rising threats of war rocking the Middle East and Northeast Asia; one too many wrecked individuals miscalculating and squeezing the trigger far too many times; and much more. I reckon over four-fifths of the named characters in the book did not survive the end of the tale. It's a very graphic read, breakneck pace, breathtaking.