Review: No Survivors by Tom Cain.

I got off to a slow start with this book but then I started to enjoy and follow the conspiracy that was lurking in the shadows. I didn’t know until this review why it started out slow. There was a book before this one that I had not read. I didn’t know, No Survivors, was a sequel to the first book, The Accident Man. Most of the time I can catch on to a story and its characters if I read out of order but this one was a little tougher. The story was suspenseful, thrilling, and with plenty of twist and turns between the well developed characters and their actions.

The story starts at the ending of the first book. The reader is up-dated on Samuel Carver’s condition of being brutally beaten and suffering from amnesia lying in a hospital bed. Than he is moved to a Swiss sanitarium and sitting by his side is his girlfriend, Alix Petrova a former Russian spy. For three months she has stayed by his side but frustrated with Carver’s condition and pressured by the sanitarium wanting his medical bills paid or they were releasing him before he was ready. He didn’t even know who he was or what his occupation entailed. He did have money for the sanitarium stay but could not remember where it was placed and Alix didn’t know where, and she had no money of her own.

Now the action and thrill begins and Tom Cain provides, using public information (research) a powerful condemnation of the Feds, damage control in Lebanon, the USS Cole, the data on the embassies in Africa, the threats of Osama Bin Laden and the events that eventually lead to the devastation of 9/11. While all this is weaved throughout the story the main issue this time is the Russians had secretly stashed one hundred nuclear “suitcase bombs”, still active, around the world years ago and one of them has been found and placed on the black-market. A Texas billionaire and a dying man, Waylon McCade gets a hold of the suitcase bomb and is planning a world wide nuclear war. Plus, there is a list of locations and codes for the bombs secretly hidden away that could cause tremendous harm to the world if it falls into the wrong hands and somehow that information leaked out to the wrong people.

Carver comes involved when his girlfriend is kidnapped and the shock jolted his memory about his life in bits and pieces. He now learns the kidnapping evolves around the issue with the nuclear bombs. He becomes adamant to find out where she is at and who is behind it. However, there are government people, terrorist, and high military personal also involved that they are all in chaos not knowing who to trust. Betrayal is coming out to it’s fullest that even as the reader at one point I didn’t know who was the good guys until near the end of the book. A lot of action, conspiracy, adventures and government protocol to make the story a real thriller….
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2 of 5 in series. Much better than average spy novel ( )

This is the second novel featuring Cain's assassin with a heart Sam Carver. Carver is recovering from a nervous breakdown/amnesia in a Swiss clinic. When his girlfriend disappears he must re-learn his assassins skills to rescue her and prevent an evangelical maniac starting armageddon with a suitcase nuke.
This is real seat-of-the-pants stuff, Cain keeps the story rattling on at a cracking place and Carver is a likeable hero. The plot maybe a little contrived on occasion and some of the characters lack depth and originality. The idea of discarded Soviet nuclear weapons lying around the world unbeknownst to anyone does make for an excting adventure story though. ( )