Breakout by Paul Herron

Published by Grand Central Publishing on April 6, 2021

Breakout is a strange novel. It imagines the mother of all hurricanes hitting Florida, essentially wiping out Miami. Yet the focus is not on the hurricane’s impact on Florida, but on its impact on a prison. That could have been an interesting story, but it has too many credibility problems to merit a recommendation.

The protagonist, Jack Constantine, is a typical thriller character who is motivated by vengeance. He was a cop with familiar thriller hero experience in Afghanistan, living a happy cop life until three criminals broke into his home to commit a burglary. Burglars don’t usually work in threes and they don’t usually murder home occupants, but these stumbled upon Jack’s pregnant wife and bashed in her head with a baseball bat. Of course, it’s not enough in a thriller like this to kill the protagonist’s wife. The wife has to be pregnant because in a thriller like this, everything is completely over the top, including Jack’s need for vengeance.

Jack slept through the murder but eventually realized his wife wasn’t in bed and wandered through the house until he found her dead body. Like all predictable thriller cops, he decides to abandon the oath he swore to uphold the law. He finds and murders one of the killers, for which he gets a measly ten years in prison. I guess it pays to be an ex-cop veteran, at least in Florida.

Jack goes to prison where, by happy coincidence, the other two killers are serving time. Jack can’t reach them until the hurricane comes along. This being Florida, the state hasn’t prepared for a prison emergency and leaves it to the warden to make a seat-of-the-pants plan. That, at least, is credible. The warden's plan is to abandon the prison, locking the outer doors on the way out (can’t have prisoners running loose in a hurricane), but unlocking all the cell doors so the prisoners will have the opportunity to kill each other before they drown. And kill each other they do, because in this over-the-top conception of prison life, the only goal of prison gangs is to kill members of other prison gangs while the prison walls are being blown down by the hurricane.

There’s an abandoned building nearby which authorities somehow think will withstand the hurricane, so some prisoners are moved there before the warden and his correctional officers run away. The two men who killed Jack’s wife are in that building, so Jack’s genius plan is to wait for the eye of the hurricane to arrive, allowing him to sprint across the prison yard, enter the old prison, and kill the two men before they die in the hurricane.

Jack can only carry out the plan because he has a key to the prison doors, provided by the only correctional officer who stayed behind, a rookie female who was late for work late and didn’t get the memo that all the staff were supposed to look out for themselves. The officer, Kiera Sawyer, is a kind-hearted woman (so why did she decide to be a prison guard?) who has deep discussions with Jack about morality when they aren’t busy fighting their way through hordes of marauding prisoners.

Kiera provides the novel’s only interesting moment when she plays dueling Bible verses with a crazed prisoner called the Preacher. The Preacher thinks it is God’s will to kill everyone who doesn’t meet the Preacher’s standards, while Kiera thinks it is God’s will for everyone to lighten up and be nice. The argument illustrates the point that the Bible can be interpreted to mean whatever anyone wants it to mean.

In all other respects, the story is predictable and not very smart. With Kiera’s help, Constantine does his soul searching and becomes a better person, sort of, by the novel’s end. A few decent prisoners who are on their side meet predictable ends. Another has an unlikely “come to Jesus” moment. I didn’t buy any of it.

Like many novels based on vengeance, the story is mostly about violence and mayhem. The setup doesn’t make a lot of sense but that’s fine because neither does the plot. The ending relies on a previously unknown connection between two characters that had me rolling my eyes. We then learn that Jack’s loss was not as Jack imagined it for reasons that, again, are intended to give the novel a late kicker but fail to do so in a credible way. Jack’s unexplained survival is impossible to believe. His overwrought self-flagellation for sleeping through Amy’s murder is boring and, unless you get off on scenes of prison riots, so is the story.

NOT RECOMMENDED