Friday, August 13, 2021

Unthinkable - Brad Parks

I've enjoyed previous books from Brad Parks. His latest is Unthinkable.

Parks has used a premise that I really like in previous books and reprises it in this latest. Everyday guy put in an untenable situation.

Stay at home Dad Nate Lovejoy is kidnapped by a secret society that tells him he must kill his wife to save a billion people. What?! The leader of the society, Vanslow DeGange can see the future. Nate's wife Jenny is a lawyer with a case against a large power company. The society says one life sacrificed to save many is what needs to be done. And it has to be Nate who kills her. Nate doesn't believe a word of it.....and then he does. He can't honestly be thinking of killing the love of his life - can he?

Okay, so secret societies have driven many plotlines in many books in the past, so this isn't anything new. And I don't mind taking a few grains of salt to buy into a plot. But, in Unthinkable, I was holding on to the whole shaker. Parks throws in some twists that changed things. I appreciated those. Even with changes to the direction things were going, I still found the plotline to be just too much to buy into. And the actions of Nate and Jenny were Unbelievable. I did keep reading as I really did want to see where Parks took things in the end. Which fell flat for me. 

Often, an author will raise funds for charity by including a donor's name in the book. Parks has done this for Unthinkable and the names are listed in the notes at the end. One distinctive name, Marcus Sakey, is not listed there. This is the name of another suspense writer. His name appears more than once and it felt like a cheap inside joke as the name is attributed to a homeless man.

I'm disappointed with this latest, but hey, you can't love them all. Check out the other reviews on Goodreads.

1 comment:

Joy said...

That's quite the conundrum. I hope he chose well. Lol.