Book: The Blonde by Duane Swierczynski


Action novel; I had some trouble suspending disbelief

Duane Swierczynski
The Blonde
St Martin's Minotaur, 2006
ISBN-10: 0-312-34379-5
ISBN-13: 978-0-312-34379-8
226 pages
$23.95

I'll cheerfully admit that I'm not entirely rational about what I'm willing to suspend disbelief over in a novel. So I'm not saying that you should have trouble with the fact that the plot of The Blonde depends on the presence in contemporary Philadelphia of infectious self-replicating nanomachines that can live in the human body and communicate with satellites. But they were a bit too much of a stretch for me.

If that doesn't bother you, you may well find the book to be an entertaining action novel. It's about a blond woman, an assassin, and an ordinary guy from outside of Chicago. Most of the action takes place within about 12 hours as the blond woman tries to draw the world's attention to her problem, the assassin tries to follow changing orders from the Department of Homeland Security, and the regular guy tries to deal with the fact that he has to meet with his wife's divorce attorney in the morning. Near the end of the book, there's a brawl in a hospital and some revenge exacted that even I enjoyed. If it hadn't been for the nanobots, I expect that I'd have enjoyed the whole thing.


The epigraph on page 159 about blonds becoming extinct has a citation that gives the BBC as its source. It was indeed published by the BBC in 2002, but it shouldn't have been because it's wrong.

Posted: Wed - May 2, 2007 at 06:49 PM   Main   Category: 

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