Near Enemy - A Spademan novel

In Near Enemy Sternbergh has delivered another taut thriller and a solid follow up to Shovel Ready. Spademan is dark, brooding, and has no time for bullshit and when an otherwise normal hit results in his intended victim witnessing the first ever death to occur in the Limn, he is drawn into something much bigger than a simple job. It is structurally very similar to his first book and I enjoy the less is more writing style Adam uses to keep the pace up and the frills to a minimum.

The specifics of the ‘radical Islamists’ and their plot to set off two bombs in New York City are revealed and with our mystery Internet killer wearing a Burqa there is not really much subtlety in terms of who our Authors bad guy is. Why? “It’s what people are most afraid of right now’. Sounds horrifyingly familiar to all the shit going on in the real world in terms of old, rich, white, magnanimous pricks, sitting in their gilded chairs telling everyone else to be afraid and pissed off at anyone who is different from them.

The failure of politicians, the exodus of tourists and then locals, the total relaxing of gun laws and the sale of the police to private business in order to keep the city going, a bit like Omnicom in Robocop, is a nice backstory that we flirt with now and again. Something I appreciated was that as a reader I found myself in the same shoes as Spademan as time and time again the plot twisted to throw my expectations. As you get to the heart of the story and the true “bad guy’ is revealed there is a lot of grey and not much black and white.

Near Enemy wraps up satisfyingly, gives us a hint of some interesting things to come and is a nice continuation of the Spademan series. At times it felt very familiar, as if it was almost a retelling of Shovel Ready instead of a new book, and I look forward to the previously mentioned new direction the third book may be taking. 3.5 Stars

I received this book from Blogging for Books in exchange for a fair and honest review.

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