Richard Paladin faces down terrorist tree-huggers in the land of micro-brews. There's even a ghost in the mix.
Richard Paladin returns and faces his toughest assignment to date. A logging company's employees have been turning up mysteriously dead, threatening a lucrative contract to fell a national forest in Oregon. The company's CEO has turned to an old friend, the President of the United States, for help, and that means sending in Paladin, America's top Environmental Protection Agent. Rather than terrorist tree-huggers, however, he finds himself in deadly combat with an adversary who displays all the talents of a professional killer. To make matters worse, there seems to be a ghost haunting the forest. Paladin's unique voice leads the reader through the familiar terrain of the Paladin series; corruption, cynical civil servants, a government with a bent moral compass, all with a healthy dose of sarcasm and humor. But it's an assignment Paladin may need all his luck to survive!
Excerpt
Chapter I
Kindling
BEAUMONT, TEXAS is one hot, muggy, miserable town, even in November. I'd been there a week and was looking forward to being anyplace else. As far as I can tell, the whole Gulf Coast is just one long strip of refineries, chemical plants, and poisonous snakes. It's a tribute to human ingenuity that people have been able to carve out an existence in such an inhospitable place. Of course, it probably wasn't quite as inhospitable before they built the refineries and chemical plants. But the snakes have always been there.
Most people wouldn't be surprised that I'd been sent to the area by the Environmental Protection Agency. It might surprise them to know why, though. I wasn't there to make sure those refineries and chemical plants weren't spewing toxins into the ground water and atmosphere. There's about as much chance of a government agency stopping corporate pollution as there is of stopping the sun from daily turning Beaumont into one hot, muggy, miserable fucking place. Less, really. Corporate America has the resources to buy off enough elected officials to keep the government out of its hair: the sun doesn't have a lobby that I know of.
But even the deep pockets of big business in the USA aren't deep enough to buy off everyone. There's always somebody who wants to make trouble. Hell, there are even people who object to Christmas. You just can't please all the people, as they say. Although, I have to admit, I've always been a bit suspicious myself of guys who like to dress up in red suits so kids will sit in their lap.
I wasn't in Beaumont to fight pollution or save Christmas. My mission was more critical. I'd been dispatched to take care of a client who seemed to have a bug up his ass about what he described as the "despoiliance" of the water-moccasin infested swamplands surrounding Beaumont. At least, that's what he called it in the anonymous letters he kept mailing to every newspaper and posting to every environmental web forum he could find. He made the mistake of mailing several of them to the EPA. That got my department's attention.
Crackpots are usually harmless. Maybe one in a thousand might actually do something more than rant. People call in bomb scares to schools all the time. It's not like the police can run down every one. That's why they just sit around eating donuts until a bomb actually goes off in some school somewhere, then track down the perpetrator and throw him in jail. Most of the time, anyway.
But when you're talking about something important, like a refinery, something that generates millions of dollars and fuels the trucks and cars clogging America's highways, the government can't afford to sit on its hands and wait for the serious crackpots to act. We're paid to protect the environment, after all. At least, the important parts of the environment.
So I was in Beaumont tracking down a crackpot to determine if he was harmless or not. Well, actually, I was just there to kill him. The EPA doesn't like to take chances.
“The Killer Trees” by David E. Manuel is the third in his Richard Paladin series and the third I read within the space of just a few weeks. After thoroughly having enjoyed the first two instalments I was curious where it might be going since the second book was so different to the first. This time Manuel moves his hero once more into a new and quite different setting: the world of forestry and tree huggers in Oregon.
I am not a regular crime fiction reader and with that in mind I was hoping to find fault with this book so I could spare more time to the more serious and work related reading of mine but I found that this instalment of the series was even better than the two previous ones. The main character Richard Paladin, an undercover contract killer working for the US government posing as a civil servant, has now come in to his own and in my opinion could probably carry off a much thinner plot than Manuel would be capable of writing without problems. Paladin’s politically incorrect opinions, the gentle side underneath his rough exterior, his sharp mind, his wit and his unpredictable interactions with the rest of the world are hugely entertaining and easy to read.
The side characters are once again well thought out and developed and provide Paladin with a lot of challenges to figure out what is going on in the woods where a series of fatal ‘accidents’ cause concern for the authorities. None of the people he meets seem to be straight forward to figure out or clear of suspicion. There are enough surprises and twists to keep you turning those pages.
This book is easily the most confident and effortless of the three as it is able to build on the solid ground the previous ones have established. I am amazed at the ideas Manuel has and the courage to move away from the safe option of a more repetitive and formulaic series-concept to a character-driven and genre-challenging style of writing. This has given him the opportunity to move Paladin freely to a huge range of future adventures and avenues closed to more pedestrian series writers.
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