Book Review - Greg Hurwitz - The Program

 

* An Audio version of this review will appear on the Book Review Podcast Reading in bed in early september (readinginbed.bandcamp.com)

Blurb:

In this powerful follow-up to his action-packed thriller The Kill Clause, Gregg Hurwitz, the new maestro of pulse-pounding suspense, ratchets up the excitement with another sensational page-turner featuring Tim Rackley, a driven lawman motivated by honor, morality, and a deep sense of justice.

Called back into the fold of the U.S. Marshals Service, Tim is tasked with retrieving Leah Henning, the daughter of a powerful Hollywood producer, from a mind-control cult. As Tim wends his way deep undercover into an insidious operation called The Program, he confronts a brand of mind-warping manipulation beyond his worst expectations.

Tim becomes enmeshed with a diverse band of characters—from the charismatic, messianic leader T. D. Betters to a cult reject burnout to the intelligent yet highly vulnerable Leah herself—and finds himself caught in a shadowy landscape of lies, manipulation, and terror. At stake: innocent minds—maybe even his own. 

Strengths:

The book focuses on Tim Rackley who in the first book of this series was a member of the Justice Dept who was ex-communicated after his daughter was killed and he went on the rampage.

I’ve not read the first book in this series but one of the strengths of this book was the fact it was very easy to get into with no notice of the first book, as it was touched on but not rammed in your face.

The Program itself is the story of what happens next when Rackley is offered redemption by a very rich couple to infiltrate a dangerous cult to rescue a vulnerable young woman.

From reading this, it certainly appears that Hurwitz has done his research with this cult and writes with a frightening level of detail about the methodology behind aggressive recruitment techniques, financial corruptions and mind control and the book is very well paced set up into four parts usually all at around the spot on point needed.

Rackley is a well wrote troubled hero who I never felt was never in any danger of being converted into joining the cult but was presented just flawed to show what damage it did cause after the events of the death of his daughter.

The main baddie “Terrance Donald "TD" Betters” if I am honest really stole the book from Rackley as I did enjoy the fact you could see he was a scam artist very, very quickly and some of the control elements he did on people such as his Lillies was really, really creepy.

Weakness:

At 460 pages or so, it did seem somewhat long and in the middle the pace did flag somewhat and the ending did seem a bit rushed / cutting off quickly.

I was very uncomfortable with the way Rackley didn’t get involved trying to stop the murder of one of the women in the cult and a number of the cult characters were a little bit too roughly sketched out for my personal tastes.

Rackley was a decent enough hero, but I would have loved to have seen Evan Smoak from the Nowhere Man let loose in this kind of setting as I got the feeling he would have being a lot more direct than Rackley and perhaps that is what was needed with this book. It was a very well wrote book however and considering it was wrote in 2006, didn’t feel too far away in places in style from his nowhere man series.

I may read the other books but that will be after Nowhere Man 7 next year which I am looking forward more.

8/10