Mixed Blood: A Thriller [Kindle Edition]

Ex-Marine Jack Burn, in debt to some bad guys, is forced to participate in a bank robbery that leaves a man dead and Jack on the run with three million bucks. He's gotta get far away and Cape Town, South Africa is just about as far as you can get. He gets himself a nice place for himself, his pregnant wife and their four-year-old son, but as luck would have it, bad luck in this case, a couple local gang guys pick his place to rob.

Jack isn't a pansy and the robbers wind up dead and now Jack has to get rid of the bodies, however Benny Mongrel, a night watchman has seen what he shouldn't have. However, for his own reasons, he just wants to take his dog and walk away. He wants no part of this. Sadly, life seldom works out the way we want and and it doesn't work out the way anybody wants in this book.

And now Jack is on the run again and there is a very bad Afrikaner fat pig of a cop (think a 1960s big bellied Mississippi sheriff) on his trail and this monster of a man who claims to love the Lord smells some dollars, three million of `em. This guy's name is Rudi Barnard, but he's not the only cop in the story, there's a good guy Zulu cop named Disaster Zondi who has a score to settle with Barnard.

And all of this goes on in with Cape Town as the backdrop. It's been a couple decades since I was last there, but the Cape Town I remember, the European style cafés, the South American style beaches, the ritzy hotels, the nightclubs, there all still there. Cape Town is a place you could spend the rest of your live in and never miss the place you came from. Well, there's the Flats, you maybe wouldn't want to spend your life there, maybe wouldn't even want to go there. And they make up much of the story, this underbelly part of the city that will suck you right into it's squalor. You'll become a resident through these pages and you won't like it.

This is a brutal, very violent and very fast-paced book that moves unrelentingly toward a climax where nobody really wins. There are a lot of bodies here, more than your average thriller and you're going to have to look really, really hard to find your typical good guy, but for all your looking you won't find him, he ain't here, but that's okay, you won't miss him.

Mixed blood is just the kind of crime thriller I've been looking for as of late. I was getting more than a little tired of mainstream novelists that feel like they need to live up to the last guy that wrote something in the same genre. Roger Smith doesn't conform to most of the traditional crime trappings. This isn't an episode of CSI or NCIS where every problem is neatly wrapped up and solved when it's all said and done. And I love that. Thank you, Roger Smith. Keep it up and you have a reader for life.

Mixed Blood's South African setting is as oppressive as a midsummer's heatstroke. You can almost feel the wind and smell the foreign sweat spilling through the pages. Also a welcomed difference in popular crime novels. The characters are pretty well drawn and the dialogue is pretty spot-on. The atmosphere is dark and hopeless and there's always a sense of suspense and dread. We're never quite sure who is going to do what. Yes, there are some predictable moments but all in all this is an extremely solid outing. I loved every page of it, honestly.

Pick this up if you want something a bit darker, a bit original and a bit more like what crime/noir should be.

I waited a good while before writing this review, because I wanted to really think about this book before committing myself to this review, and after thinking about it, I still believe what I did when I first finished it - while the book is technically good, well-written, rounded characters, and lots of action - it is quite simply not to my taste. Why is that? Because, really, not a single character is that likable. There should be at least one character to whom one can relate when reading a book, and there was none such in this novel. In fact, I found Jack Burns' wife particularly unlikable - everything that man did, he did for her. It was for her comfort that he did what he did back in the U.S. - to make sure that she had plenty of money and a nice house to live in. It was to protect her (and their child) that he did what he had to do in Cape Town. Is she grateful? Does she appreciate it? No. Instead, she announces her plans to go to the U.S. Consul after having their 2nd child and turn him in.

But I digress. The product description provides a nice, succinct description of the plot of the text, so I won't waste your time going over that again. The only character I sort of liked was Benny Mongrel - at least he loved his dog.

This story is gritty, dark and very difficult to read at times because of that. But, as mentioned above, it is not that which turned me off to the book - I've certainly read my share of "dark" stories and enjoyed them - it was the lack of a character to whom I could relate, or who I at least liked, that kept me from enjoying this book more than I did. If that isn't a problem for you, please do feel free to check out this book, because it is a technically very well-written thriller.