ExNotes Book Review: The Devil’s Hand

As airport bookstore thrillers go, it doesn’t get too much better than Jack Carr’s The Devil’s Hand.  Yeah, it’s a bit formulaic, and yeah, the ending is predictable (spoiler alert:  the good guys win), but the plot basics are timely and a bit unusual.  Instead of just plain old bad guys, rogue nations, and Middle Eastern terrorists, this one involves unleashing a bioweapon on US soil.  The good guy, James Reece (why do they always have such WASPy names?), manages to thwart the effort and limit the death toll to about 5000 people.  The parallels between the plot’s Marburg U virus variant and Covid 19 (and the riots and insurrections that follow) are eerily similar to what the world has gone through in the last two years.

Reece checks all the airport bookstore thriller main character boxes:  Former special forces operator on a revenge mission, the US president’s personal assassin, martial arts expert, handgun expert, rifle expert, shotgun expert, knife expert, tomahawk expert, and on and on it goes.  That’s the formulaic part.  The plot basics are where the story diverges from what you might expect, and that makes The Devil’s Hand interesting enough to be worth a read.  At 576 pages, you probably won’t get through it on a single flight, but that’s okay.  You can finish it on the return leg.

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