Not long after I read The Barrabas Fire, I picked this up, the last volume in the series. I mean, I have only read a handful of them and have not seen them in the wild recently–not that I’ve been looking–so it’s not as satisfying as reading the last of The Executioner novels on my shelves. But it’s a little sad to reach the end, although I have plenty of books in the gaps in my collection if I am so inclined.
At any rate, I had thought that the book would not wrap things up or address the ending of the series as I expected that the books/stories would have been farmed out in such a fashion that the writer would not know this was the end, but I might have been mistaken. In this book, Barrabas wonders whether he’s getting to old or if he’s lost his focus, and he considers retirement. But first, one last job: to reclaim a Soviet scientist who defected but was snatched from a safe house in the Ozarks and whisked away to Scotland by a tech millionaire with communist sympathies who wants to return him to continue work on Icefort, a Soviet space weapon.
Barrabas assembles the remaining elements of his team, and, well, does that thing they do. Set pieces, assaults on heavily defended positions, and finis. In this case, finis finis.
The book was dated whilst it was still on the book stands. It mentions going back and forth across the Berlin Wall, and the Berlin Wall fell in 1989. The collapse of the Soviet bloc must have had a crazy impact on these monthly subscription thrillers with that international flavor. The ones in the actual printing pipeline–what would you do with them? The ones already on spec–do you have them re-written, or do you just pump them out there and hope for the best? Perhaps it explains why non-international thriller series like The Executioner and The Deadlands would continue on for another decade or two.
But this one does feel a bit like the end of an era, which is probably just me retconning my own midlife crisis onto it.
