Published by Grand Central Publishing on September 7, 2021
Credibility is not a prerequisite for the modern thriller. Writers know that they can ignore credibility if they craft a plot that encourages the reader to gloss over the story’s more unlikely events. Iris Johansen manages that task, albeit just barely, in High Stakes.
The novel begins with two hunters in a Russian forest trying to find and kill a 19-year-old woman named Lara. Fortunately, this isn’t another novel that spins Richard Connell’s famous story, “The Most Dangerous Game.” The hunt occurs early in the story, ends quickly, and sets up the action that follows.
The hunt is one of many contests created by Lara’s father, Anton Balkon, and a Russian crime boss, Boris Volkov. The two men wager on whether Lara will prevail. Sometimes she’s tasked with stealing things. The latest wager is on Lara’s survival. It resulted from Volkov’s displeasure at his recent losses to Anton as Lara used cunning and planning to succeed in her tasks. Her death will be Volkov’s revenge.
Lara is an improbably competent person. She has mastered a variety of life skills at a young age, from lock picking to hand-to-hand combat, but she is also a world-class pianist. Her ability to play Tchaikovsky attracted the attention of a Russian criminal named Kaskov, who (for multiple reasons) wants to extract Lara from Russia before Volkov manages to kill her. To that end, Kaskov hires Logan Tanner, the world’s best poker player. Tanner owns several casinos but he used to make a living extracting individuals from dangerous environments. Tanner is willing to do a favor for Kaskov if Kaskov will use his connections to locate Tanner’s mentor, a fellow named Sandrino, who has disappeared. By the kind of happy coincidence that only a thriller writer can imagine, the Sandrino story and Lara’s story are linked.
The plot follows Tanner as he extracts Lara and deals with the aftermath as Volkov and Anton come looking for her. Tanner and Lara travel to a compound in New York and then to a safe house in Vegas with Lara’s feisty mother in tow. They thwart killers while making a plan to take down Volkov and Anton. The plan leads to a climax that is filled with gunplay and explosions, including the obligatory helicopter crash.
Tanner would be shallow but for the depth of his testosterone. He spends about half his time setting up the much younger Lara for seduction while nobly claiming that he can’t seduce her because it just wouldn’t be right. Whether they will end up in bed is never a serious question. The story’s romantic angle is a bit cheesy, but even if Tanner had conquered Lara and then dumped her, it wouldn’t have bothered me. Lara is impossibly petulant. She manages to manipulate Tanner into doing everything her way, which usually involves taking Lara into dangerous situations, and then makes Tanner apologize for ever thinking he should do things his own way instead of deferring to a 19-year-old’s wisdom. It seems clear that Tanner only acquiesces because putting Lara’s life at risk is necessary if he ever expects to get her into bed.
I can’t say I liked any of the characters, with the possible exception of a gruff fellow who was also Sandrino’s friend and who threatens Tanner with death whenever Tanner admits that he hasn’t yet learned Sandrino’s fate. Like Tanner, he’s one dimensional but the dimension is entertaining.
Johansen has written a couple of dozen novels in the Eve Duncan series and a few novels in each of two other series, as well as several standalones. I don’t know whether High Stakes is intended to launch a new series. It isn’t one I would be excited about, simply because Lara is both annoying and too perfect to be real, while Tanner suffers from a serious personality shortage. I can recommend the book as an average modern thriller simply because it moves quickly and the action is fun, but it isn’t a book that thriller fans need to place high on their stack of unread books.
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