Roy Chaney’s SEVEN TIMES DEAD is a rush of energetic activity, a book that starts out with a raid by unknown gunmen on a police car carrying our hero to an unnamed and unknown destination—leaving him fleeing for his life. In fact, he spends a great deal of the book fleeing for his life (sometimes alone and sometimes with the mysterious Aurora) from one or another violent and secretive organization or intelligence agency—whether it be French, British, American, or a mercenary terrorist organization known as the Rising Sun. All of these are working against each other, for reasons known mainly to themselves, in a tangle of international activity that pulls Slade into its knots despite his complete ignorance of what in fact is actually going on (an ignorance the reader largely shares).
This is a book that’s largely about the action, constantly in motion from the very first page to the end, rarely pausing to sort out the tangles in between desperate chases and dramatic gunfights—a shot of pure adrenaline in literary form. It’s an almost dreamlike book, a surreal nightmare of betrayals, back-stabbings, apparent liberations that lead to new captivities, and daring escapes that lead only to a new group of enemies. In fact, the book’s entire nature is telegraphed early in the story by the description of a novel Slade tells his friend he’s just read: “a slapdash thriller about a man and a woman who dodge bullets and good sense for two hundred pages, before disappearing into an ambiguous ending.” His friend suggests he write a book just like that, leaving the reader to wonder whether the rest of the events in the novel are merely the main character’s storytelling and adding another layer of dreamlike unreality to the story.
The ending is certainly ambiguous, even jarring—the point in the nightmare where a reader might expect to wake up suddenly, or the point in the story where the narrative trails off dramatically. In short, readers who like twisty plots combined with vigorous action and a surreal, dramatic haze of mystery will thoroughly enjoy this book. Readers who enjoy knowing what is going on at every given moment, however, would best avoid it.
Roy Chaney’s SEVEN TIMES DEAD is a lively, energetic action/adventure novel with a dizzying array of twists, turns, and characters.
~Catherine Langrehr for IndieReader