Review of Ghostman

Goodreads | Eric_W Welch (Forreston, IL)'s review of Ghostman:


Ghosting is different from vanishing. Vanishing among professional criminals is discouraged if not condemned.  After the job, you are obliged to follow the plan;  if you disappear, especially with the money, all bets are off, and everyone will be after you.

Ghosting is very different as it involves assuming different identities and becoming different people. In this book, our protagonist -- the name is hardly relevant since he assumes so many different ones, but we'll call him Jack -- is obliged to fly to Atlantic City to clean up after a Federal Payload job that has gone all wrong.  The details of what makes transport of billions of dollars from the Federal Reserve to banks (and especially casinos) around the country is really interesting) and our hero has but 48 hours to clean things up or everything goes to hell for Marcus, the mastermind of the operation who is trying to steal not just from the Treasury department, but the drug cartel. How it was to work is rather ingenious.  But things go wrong and one man is killed and another has vanished.  Jack is charged with cleaning it up and fixing it.

Some critics have criticized Hobbs for lack of character development.  I wonder if this wasn't partly deliberate as the anti-hero is supposed to be colorless, formless and ghostlike.  It doesn’t matter that we don’t like him;  it's a good story, in this case very well read by Jake Weber ( a narrator I had not heard before but will add to my list of narrators to watch, err, listen for.)


BTW, the protagonist read the Aeneid in Latin as a boy (some kids played with model trains, he read Latin) and he always wanted to be Aeneas. His motto became: 'Flectere si nequeo superos, Acheronta movebo.'

My motto has always been Cave ab homine unius libri.

'via Blog this'