Baptism by Max Kinnings

Description.....
07:45am. A monk lies dead in Snowdonia, a knife protruding from his throat.
A young family is being held at gunpoint in a house in Wimbledon.
The mission has begun.
08:56am. A London Underground train is stationary in a tunnel, four hundred passengers trapped inside. All efforts to communicate with it have been met with silence.
09:15am. DCI Ed Mallory has just started his day. The Met’s top hostage negotiator - despite having been blinded thirteen years earlier - Mallory is about to discover that, today, an underground train is not the only thing on the line.

My Review......

The scene is set, we have the characters in place.....

Mallory is the Metropolitan Police’s top negotiator. He’s good at his job, he seems to catch more details than most, is that because for the last thirteen years Mallory has lived with blindness?

A terrorist cell are holding hostages, and its Mallory’s job to negotiate their release. It’s a tense time. Is he successful? And what do the terrorists want?

And that poor Tibetan Monk!! What role does he have in this?

The plot reminded me of a Clive Cussler Novel (lots of strands all coming together from different directions)

It’s a very good book, and I found it hard to put down. We get a little background on the characters, but not enough to bog you down with.

And who lives and who dies? It kept me on my toes, and it’s not till almost the end do you find that out.

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Baptism by Max Kinnings is an up-to-the-minute hostage thriller, detailing the ‘high jacking’ of a London Underground train on the hottest day of the year. It’s an action thriller, face-paced, exciting and, at times, gripping. I admired what felt like a genuine attempt to do something different with the madcap terrorists plunging innocent people into terrifying jeopardy plot, and it was an easy, if somewhat two dimensional, read. The plot, although relatively thin, moves at a rapid pace with the story told over just a few hours, and I couldn’t help but be sucked in.

The hero is hostage negotiator Ed Mallory, who having been blinded by an earlier situation, uses his enhanced senses to both communicate and understand those who he comes into contact with. Mallory was an interesting character and Kinnings portrays him in an original and non-clichéd way. It was a shame that most of the other characters were pretty cardboard. This extends to the terrorists in particular, who even allowing for the fact that it’s hard for most of us understand the motivations of terrorists, their central driving force is not convincing. Like many fiction writers, Kinnings confuses mental illness/madness with straightforward badness. The terrorists’ success in executing their outrageous plan, with barely a hitch, evidenced of well systematised ‘delusions’ doesn’t sit with the explanation that they’re religious maniacs. Perhaps I’m being very nit-picky here, but I wanted the story to convince me; as it was, I couldn’t get over this central implausibility.

Still, overall it’s a good book, and the author deserves four stars for trying to do something different with a largely tired formula. There’s rumour that the book’s been optioned for a film, but unless the screenwriter adds some other plot elements, it’s likely to be a fairly predictable action adventure romp.

©Koplowitz 2013
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