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Ron Miller's DARK CORRIDORS VOL. 9, No. 42 |
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Madmen take over a town
in the Canadian wilderness
of TheColumnists.com
The new thriller
by Robert Liparulo ("Comes A Horseman") comes from
the same suspense zone of that classic short story "The
Most Dangerous Game" in which a psycho big game hunter hunts
human prey with a crossbow and a pack of dogs on a remote island
in the Pacific.
Only Liparulo makes the stakes much higher in his "Deadfall" (Thomas Nelson, $24.95): His "hunters" are a team of psychos who take over an entire township in the remote Canadian wilderness and begin killing off the populace with the help of a satellite-deployed laser cannon that can incinerate you on the spot.
Their motive: Fun and games. Seriously. They are videotaping the carnage and will use the footage to add extra realism to a hideous new videogame they're designing for the slopeheads who love to play such games, killing make believe people by the dozen in bloody video games. Imagine the thrill they'll have when they know these are real people they're killing--over and over again!
Fiddler Falls is a very small town with very limited access in a wooded, mountainous area of Saskatchewan. The goons who co-opt the use of the laser cannon, developed by a huge private corporation for the use of the U.S. Military, quickly vaporize the town's only lawman and then start picking out victims to hunt down with their conventional bullet-firing weaponry. If anyone seems likely to escape the hunt, the laser tracks him down from 280 miles up and zaps him. All communications have been shut down, so the bad guys certainly don't want to let anybody escape overland to get the word out to Canadian lawmen.
What the baddies don't know, though, is that a group of four real-life sportsmen have been dropped near the town by helicopter to enjoy a week of fishing and hunting, blissfully unaware that they've been left behind in a hell zone ruled by madmen. One of the legitimate sportsmen is Hutch, a deadly marksman with a heavy duty bow and arrow. When he discovers he and his friends are quarry, he goes after the crazies with his own silent--and very deadly weapon. Archery may be a primitive means of defense, but it evens up the long odds against the story's heroes in very short order.
I love this sort of thriller because it
calls upon first class survival instincts for the real hunters
to stay away from the laser blasts and come after the ragtag
band of killers, led by Declan, the wigged-out son of the industrial
magnate who developed the laser cannon.
One refuge from the laser turns out to be an abandoned mineshaft
that provides the heroes with a protected home base from which
to launch their attacks--until the killers get wise to the dodge
and aim the cannon right at the mouth of the mineshaft!
While cranking up the thrills, Liparulo also works in a romantic
storyline involving Hutch and the widow of the vaporized town
cop.
This is a big book--464 pages--but I raced through it, carried along by the pace of Liparulo's writing. Publication date is Nov. 6, but you can order the book now from most of the online booksellers. If you like high tech adventure, set in a wilderness background, you can't miss with "Deadfall."
©2007 by Ron Miller. The book cover illustration is courtesy of Thomas Nelson publishers. This column first posted Oct. 22, 2007.
Ron
Miller is a former nationally syndicated television columnist
and the author of "Mystery! A Celebration," the official
companion book to PBS' "Mystery!" series. He currently
writes about television mysteries for MYSTERY SCENE magazine.
You can comment on this column online. Please address your message to either "The Editors" or Ron Miller. To send an email, click here and don't forget to mention Ron's name: talkback@thecolumnists.com
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