Downfall by Jeff Abbott

Published by Grand Central Publishing on July 16, 2013

As the result of events in the first two Sam Capra novels, former CIA agent and current bar owner Capra is running errands of a questionable nature for a woman named Mila on behalf of the Round Table.  His new assignment is to identify the person who poisoned Round Table member Dalton Monroe.  Before he can make any progress, he’s fighting for his life against a Russian who chased a woman into his San Francisco bar.

Capra’s larger problem is a bad guy named John Belias.  When Belias isn’t training soccer moms to be assassins, he’s busy “hacking people” as if they were computers, plugging them into a network of powerful people that he’s assembled.  As is typical of modern thrillers, the network extends into the highest levels of business and government.  Conspiracy theorists should love the Capra novels.

One of the soccer mom assassins is Janice Keene.  Diana, Janice’s daughter, initially knows nothing about her mother’s double life.  She learns the truth from a hidden video that brings both Diane and Belias into Capra’s world.  Belias wants the video.  He also wants Capra -- but, it seems, so do some other mysterious, unidentified conspirators.  The plot jumps off from that starting block.

Downfall’s strengths are the pace, the action, and the clever (albeit farfetched) plot.  If the story borders on the preposterous, it at least has the merit of being less preposterous than the first two novels in the series.  Apart from a couple of small plot holes (or at least small points that didn’t make sense to me), the story is one I could swallow, and it culminates in a reveal that, if not entirely surprising, is satisfying.  Downfall’s downside is that too many chases and fight scenes are indistinguishable from those found in other thrillers.

I’m not sure Janice’s secret career or her motivation for pursuing it are entirely believable.  Other characters who apparently live normal (albeit unusually successful) lives turn out to be part-time, stone cold killers, and I found that difficult to accept.  I snickered a bit at the Faustian references to Belias, a character who is a bit over-the-top, but in a way that makes him cool, like Bond villains are cool.  In any event, I had no trouble letting those reservations slide for the sake of enjoying a good story.

There are aspects of Sam Capra -- particularly his sarcasm -- that make him an appealing character.  He becomes a bit tedious, however, when he tells us again and again that he loves his son and craves a normal life.  The same is true of Janice, who repeatedly reminds us of her love for her daughter and her devotion to Belias, as if saying it over and over will cause the reader to accept Janice’s weak motivation for behaving in sinister ways.  I give Jeff Abbott credit, however, for developing the personalities of two soccer mom assassins in uncommon depth.

I give also give Abbott credit for moving the series forward.  Downfall sends Capra’s story in a new direction, and key events late in the novel assure that the direction will change again.  I wasn’t sure I wanted to read this installment of the Capra saga given the silly setup in the first two novels, but Downfall left me looking forward to the next book.

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