http://tamaranth.blogspot.com/2013/04/201306-dark-places-jon-evans.html ( )

Exciting story. But I especially like this book for its account of the Burning Man Festival, and the way various characters related to the festival in very different ways.
I am also intrigued to find out more about this author, since he comes from my home town... ( )

In this book Paul Wood finds himself traveling in Sarajevo with his girlfriend when they meet up with her old high school buddy, now a battered wife in a relationship with brutal man. In order to get her out of the country they team up with smugglers, and so it begins.

Like Evans' first book, Dark Places, the characters are given pleasantly realistic reactions. When they are approached by gangs they don't yell "Yippee-kay-yay" and fly through the air with guns blazing, they run. Paul Wood thinks twice, thrice, many times about how to deal with the war criminals/drug smugglers/etc. When he hurts, he hurts, and he doesn't do a double-lux flying kick immediately after being punched.

In general it's an entertaining quick read, but I didn't enjoy it quite as much as the first. Paul spends most of the first half in self-pity, afraid to lose his girlfriend because he's become a lazy jobless bum (due to the dotcom crash). He whines and accuses and generally is pitiable, which doesn't lend much charisma to his character. In the end, there is something else that made me uneasy. In Dark Places a group of friends team up to kill one serial murderer who was out to kill them. Blood Price involves killing several characters, one of whom was made more or less agreeable early on. Our heroes agree that simply killing them in their sleep is uncool, but apparently blowing them out of the sky as they lift off in a helicopter is perfectly fine. Given the right means, the end didn't really give them a second thought.

Adventure/spy/mystery novels generally don't worry too much about the consequences. Like any summer blockbuster, they don't spend too much time counting bodies. But Evans goes to such a great extent to make our heroes real, that I end up holding them to a higher moral standard than James Bond. It bugs me that they can kill and drink beer afterward, even when the dead were already established as evil murderous drug runners. It probably shouldn't bother me given the genre, and indeed this book still had a lot of entertaining chase scenes which add an exciting edge. I'll pick up his next book Invisible Armies sometime, but I won't set my bar too high. ( )