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THE SECOND HORSEMAN by Kyle Mills begins with no small irony. Master thief Brandon Vale, arguably the best there is, has been convicted of and imprisoned for a crime --- a jewel heist, no less --- that he did not commit. What is even stranger is that, as he is doing his time in a stand-up manner, he suddenly finds himself escaping (unwillingly) from prison, coaxed along by an unfriendly guard on the inside and shooed away by a fusillade of bullets on the outside.
Vale’s world turns upside down when he discovers that the man behind his involuntary prison break is Richard Scanlon, a former FBI agent who framed him for the heist that resulted in his imprisonment. Scanlon has a reason for this change of heart, however. A Ukrainian crime organization has put 12 nuclear warheads on the market. Scanlon is aware of the sale but cannot get the U.S. government to pay serious attention to it. Two hundred million dollars will be needed to take the warheads off the market; in order to obtain this amount of money, Vale plans to rob the bank deposits of the major Las Vegas casinos.
Vale is a loveable rogue with a bit of a smart-aleck style, so the result is somewhat of an Indiana Jones meets Ocean's Eleven caper. There is a villain behind the curtain who wants Scanlon’s plan to simultaneously succeed and fail for his own chilling reasons, but his identity and motives are revealed far too early in the narrative to create much suspense, at least as to the “who” and “why” issues.
Still, THE SECOND HORSEMAN is great fun in spots, as Vale and his minder, a fetching lady named Catherine Juarez, attempt to prevent a nuclear conflagration masterminded by a brilliant but twisted genius who believes that the utter destruction of millions of people will bring peace to a region that has never known it.
Vale is an interesting, even charismatic, character who steadies the novel when the plot occasionally stumbles. While there are portions that require some suspension of disbelief, Mills is an entertaining and at time compelling storyteller who can keep the pages happily and quickly turning. Though not his best book --- FADE arguably retains that laurel --- THE SECOND HORSEMAN is certainly worth the investment if the reader is willing to make it.
--- Reviewed by Joe Hartlaub
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