Slash and Burn by Matt Hilton

Published by Harper on October 25, 2011

Some of the blurbs for Slash and Burn compare Joe Hunter to Jack Reacher. Hunter is like a copy made on a Xerox machine that's out of toner. Lee Childs' Reacher is an action hero who is capable of subtle thought. Matt Hilton's Hunter is about as subtle as a hand grenade.

The plot can be summarized in a few words because there's so little of it. An NYPD officer named Kate Piers hires tough guy Joe Hunter to help her find her missing sister, a woman who is in trouble with a sinister character in Kentucky. As they pursue the sister, Kate is taken captive. Hunter recruits two tough guy friends to help him find Kate (and her sister) which can only be accomplished by killing a mess of people, although most of the killing is done by Hunter alone, causing his friends to complain that they weren't part of the fun. Cars explode, a helicopter crashes, lots of people die. The story is all in the title: Slash and Burn.

Like many tough guy heroes, Hunter is insufferably self-righteous. That can be an interesting character trait in a novel of greater depth, but depth is not a strong point of Slash and Burn. In common with other vigilante tough guys, Hunter defines himself by his sense of honor. He tells us that he takes pride in not shooting someone who is running away from him, even knowing that the person will later try to kill him. Yet just pages earlier, Hunter shoots a man in the head who is sitting helpless and dazed behind the wheel of a crashed car because the man could conceivably recover sufficiently to emerge from the car, arm himself, and distract Hunter as he tries to kill several other bad guys who are gunning for him. Apart from Hunter's flexible notions about shooting the helpless, the concept of a vigilante with a meaningful moral code is a joke (there's nothing moral about murdering someone simply because the vigilante decides he deserves killing, or shooting a man between the legs because the man "raped a woman's mind"), but the glorification of the moral vigilante is standard fare in tough guy fiction. The best tough guy characters are either amoral -- they don't care if their actions are right or wrong -- or recognize the inconsistency of their moral standards and are troubled by their actions. Hunter has none of that complexity. He's a remarkably boring killing machine.

As is customary in the worst tough guy fiction, the bad guys are cartoons, so obviously evil that the reader will cheer when they are killed by our vigilante hero. And killed they are. When the heroic tough guy gets into a shootout with six bad guys in a novel like this, you know the good tough guy will escape with a flesh wound while his adversaries are felled by bullets placed between their eyes. A novel with this much action shouldn't be dull, but Slash and Burn is so unimaginative that it was putting me to sleep.

Final complaint: Hunter has no problem carrying his guns onto airplanes because he has false documents identifying him as an air marshal. We're asked to believe that neither TSA nor the flight crews ever wonder why they weren't notified that an armed air marshal would be taking a particular flight. That implausible explanation for Hunter's ability to fly while armed smacks of lazy writing.

Do I have anything positive to say? Hilton writes in a reasonably fluid prose style. The pace is quick. The novel is easy to read. It just isn't interesting.

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