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Over the course of his last eight books, Tim Green has been getting better and better --- sharpening his plots, honing his characters and taking bigger leaps forward. If there was any doubt that Green had fully arrived with THE FIFTH ANGEL, his last novel, the issue should be resolved with THE FIRST 48.
Green's prologue contains some of the best writing he has ever done, setting up this fine tale of a murky bioterrorist plot, a reporter who gets too close to a story and a fallen soul with a final chance at redemption. The latter is Tom Redmon, a former prosecutor who picked the wrong man to go after. That man was Michael Gleason, then the heir of a wealthy family, now a powerful, if not entirely respected, U.S. Senator. When we meet him, Redmon is an alcoholic attorney, haunted by the gentle ghost of his wife and busily jousting at legal windmills with little or no success. His only real joys are his daughter Jane, a rookie reporter for the Washington Post, and his friend Mike Tubbs, a physical and intellectual bear of a man.
When Jane begins receiving information from an anonymous source that is detrimental to Gleason, she leaps at the chance to write a story about the man who ruined her father's life. Gleason learns of the story and takes immediate steps to put the skids to it --- permanently. Jane goes missing, and Redmon and Tubbs are galvanized into immediate action.
Redmon knows there is a school of thought that holds that if a person is missing, they are, more often than not, dead by the first 48 hours after their disappearance. Green niftily transforms this factoid into a plot device, as Redmon stays conscious of how much time has elapsed since his daughter's disappearance, literally racing against the clock to find her. Jane's trail leads to an isolated island off the coast of upstate New York that houses a mysterious research facility with a secret that has the potential to jeopardize, and save, the entire East Coast. Jane, meanwhile, is either being rescued or kidnapped. Or both.
THE FIRST 48 is a great ride. Tubbs and Redmon are Green's most memorable characters to date; Redmon's penchant for appropriately spouting off quotations from history's most famous and successful military leaders is an interesting sidebar to his personality. Fans of John Grisham who have yet to discover Green will be delighted to do so with this novel, and should set aside some time to familiarize themselves with Green's bibliography while they're waiting for his next novel.
--- Reviewed by Joe Hartlaub
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