JUSTIFIED ACTION (2013) by Earl Staggs
Reviewed by Barry Ergang
As I did when I reviewed
Short Stories of Earl Staggs, I want
to preface this review with the disclosure that Earl and I are longtime friends
by virtue of having been colleagues on the staff of
Futures Mystery Anthology Magazine. When he offered me the Kindle
edition of his latest novel,
Justified
Action, in return for an objective review, I readily agreed. I've enjoyed
all of the short fiction of his that I've read (which includes two Derringer
winners) as well as his first novel, the detective story
Memory of a Murder.
I read
Justified
Action right after finishing Donald Hamilton's
The Vanishers, a Matt Helm
novel, and it was a refreshing change.
The
Vanishers was too long, felt padded, and thus what should have been a
suspenseful fast-moving page-turner turned into a slog. In marked contrast,
Justified Action has exactly the kind of
pace one wants in a thriller. The novel introduces Tallmadge "Tall" Chambers, a
lieutenant in the U.S. Army. "A year ago, he was a Captain stationed in Kabul, Afghanistan,
training new recruits and leading special ops in country. After an ugly
incident with a drunken Colonel, he was sentenced to desk duty here at the
Pentagon." He has three months left before he can retire after twenty
years of service, and he's eagerly—and restlessly—looking forward to it.
His life-changing moment occurs when his old comrade-in-arms,
Stephen Winslow, with whom he worked in Special Forces, takes him on a mission
to Texas to
kill a band of terrorists. Tall is subsequently recruited by General Cyrus
Brock as the newest member of an unnamed special government agency begun by
Brock four years earlier. "The CIA,
NSA, Central Security, all the agencies, have their hands full with the major
groups everyone's heard of," Brock explains. "For every one of those
major groups, there's a hundred small groups or cells. No one knows about
them...What my special agency does is track them down and put them out of
business. And when I say put them out of business, I mean by whatever measures
are necessary, no matter how extreme they may seem," adding, "Unless
there are extenuating circumstances, we do not take prisoners...We operate with
one simple credo. Kill one terrorist, save a hundred lives."
The day after he accepts the General's offer to join the
agency, Tall learns about Anatole Remski, a dangerous and elusive terrorist
mastermind. Six months later, Stephen Winslow dispatches him to a mission in Afghanistan
that results in Remski's capture. It's a short-lived victory because Remski manages
to escape—not long after he assures Tall that they'll meet again and that, when
they do, Tall will die.
The novel covers several years' duration, during which time
someone very near and dear to Tall dies in an automobile accident, leaving Tall
in a depressive state for weeks until Stephen tells him that it was murder and
Remski might be behind it. Moreover, various operatives around the world Tall
has worked with are being systematically killed, making Remski the likeliest
suspect. Re-energized, Tall sets out to hunt him down. In the process, he and
the reader encounter quite a few surprises, among which is that a potential
Presidential candidate might somehow be involved.
Earl's economical prose style is effectively descriptive
while moving the story at an unflagging pace. Unlike The Vanishers, Justified Action
contains no passages that feel like filler. The principal characters, and even
some of the minor ones, are well-delineated. Ruthless, coolly pragmatic Matt
Helm, though fascinating to watch, has never seemed to me especially companionable,
whereas Tall Chambers, though ruthless when he has to be, is a likable hero, a guy
you'd enjoy having a drink with.
The book teems with action, as a thriller should, but the
on-screen violence is handled discreetly. Readers who are repelled by graphic
depictions of brutal activities needn't shun this novel on those grounds; Earl does
not revel in gore-fests. Nor does he find it necessary to depict sexual
encounters. They're handled with tasteful obliquity. Readers who are offended by raw language need to
realize that this is not a cozy domestic novel of manners; many of the
characters swear from time to time. However, the profanity is not taken to
extremes, and there is not a single f-bomb in the entire book.
Justified Action
is highly recommended to anyone who loves an absorbing, fast-paced action
thriller. And I'd say that about it even if the author wasn't an old friend.
Barry Ergang © 2013
A Derringer Award winner, some of Barry's written work is
available at
Amazon and
Smashwords.
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