Blog Tour: Downfall by Will Jordan #BookReview

‘My name is Ryan Drake and this is just the beginning.’

‘My name is Ryan Drake and this is just the beginning.’

Ryan Drake and his team are in hiding, having become sworn enemies of states and agencies around the world. When a CIA operative is killed in a car bomb, Drake is shocked to see an old enemy felled. Further still when a video is released claiming responsibility for the attack… under the name of Ryan Drake.

Forced out of hiding, Drake embarks upon a mission to confront his past. When the stranger from the video reaches out, hinting at secrets just out of reach, he leads Drake on a high-octane journey through the slums of Rio to the deserts of Afghanistan.

Following in the wake of his trail of destruction, the team must pursue Drake as he stops at nothing to find the key to his past.

‘Downfall’ is an enjoyably cinematic, wildly melodramatic thriller that reads a bit like a Robert Ludlum novel reimagined as a telenovela. It’s the 8^th book in the Ryan Drake series and the first I’ve read. I went into it expecting something that could be read as a standalone book and it kind of can, but I can’t help feeling I’d have enjoyed it a lot more if I’d read the other books first.

The core plot is pretty standard action movie stuff – Drake is a part of an elite team of special forces spy types. When a terrorist starts a series of attacks and uses Ryan’s name, Drake starts a desperate globe-trotting mission to identify the attacker and save his name. Throw in a load of backstory about secret experiments, some Washington intrigue between the different security agencies and tempestuous relationships within the team and you have all the makings of a readable and enjoyable thriller.

The real strength of the books is the efficiency of the action scenes. That’s good news because there are a lot of them. They’re punchy and tight, with a visual flair that really jumps off the page and I found them genuinely gripping. What worked less well for me is the plot that ties them all together. I always knew what the characters were doing, but I didn’t always know why they were doing it, which led to a bit of head scratching. I think a large part of the problem is that this was the first Drake books I’ve read. There were numerous sub-plots that obviously continued from previous novels in the series and a lot of the detail of the relationships between the characters was lost on me.

That’s a shame, because I think there’s a good chance that had all that been clearer to me this would be a 4-star rather than a 3-star review. There’s an enjoyably heightened sense of emotion to everything that happens that’s really fun. It all has the crazy energy of a manga series, where everything that happens is either the worst or the best thing ever and every double cross is met with gasps of horror. I think it would have enjoyed it even more if I knew the full back story and could enjoy the multiple twists and turns without worrying that I didn’t really know what was going on.

That’s a roundabout way of saying that this was a fun, over the top read that’s packed with action and incident. If you’ve read the other books I expect that you’ll love it, but if you haven’t it might be best to start with the first, as I now intend to.

3/5

This post is part of a damppebbles blog tour. If you’d like to check out other reviews of the book, you can find them at the blogs below.