Requiem for an Assassin (Barry Eisler)

Available at all good bookstores, courtesy of Penguin Books South Africa

In my crazed mind, Barry Eisler’s sexy assassin, John Rain, is a hybrid of Lee Child’s drifter Jack Reacher, Keith Lindsay’s dark vigilante Dexter, and Chow Yun-Fat. And in the long-awaited sixth Rain novel, Requiem for an Assassin, he’s better than ever.

Newly entangled in a tempestuous romance with Israeli Mossad agent, Delilah, Rain is caught off-guard when friend and fellow hit-man-for-hire, Dox, is kidnapped from his Bali villa by rogue CIA operative Jim Hilger (a familiar Eisler antagonist).

Carry out three hits for me, demands the vengeful Hilger, meet my deadlines and make each look like a natural death, or Dox dies.

And so John Rain enters a web of murder, mayhem and madness that stretches from Bali to Paris, San Francisco to Saigon and New York to Rotterdam, as he tries to work out what Hilger is up to and how to rescue Dox – before the final likely hit: Rain himself.

Requiem is a goodie: tight, taut and tough, with rare insights into the moral dilemmas that must plague any assassin who, deep down, starts to wrestle with his own humanity. But I’m faced with my own dilemma: what happens if…gasp!...this is the last of Rain?

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