A Flash of Red - Hardcover

Harvey, Clay

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0399141561 ISBN 13: 9780399141560

Publisher: Putnam Adult, 1996

Synopsis

A former special military operative-turned-writer and family man, Tyler Vance finds himself the target of a vengeful and violent family after he kills a bank robber during a holdup. A first novel.

About this title

From Kirkus Reviews:

Good old boys from the Bible Belt put paid to the vengeful plans of alien weapons traffickers in this preachy debut thriller. One fateful day, Tyler Vance (a North Carolina freelance writer who churns out books and articles for the guns and ammo market) finds himself in the middle of a bank robbery while on his way to deposit a sizable royalty check. Pistol-packing Ty drops two of the bandits with a few well-aimed shots, but two others escape with a hostage. One of the holdup men who got away is a Bosnian Serb named Valentin Resovic, and his brother Mikhail was a victim of Vance's accurate fire. A transnational gun-runner and racketeer with a lengthy Interpol file, the surviving Resovic vows to make Ty pay for his loss. But Vance, a veteran of a hush-hush Army unit that trained him in a variety of lethal arts and employed his talents in Korea during the '70s, is not without his resources. Though day care is a constant problem, the straight-arrow widower who single-parents a clever five-year-old son quickly recruits a special force of family members, friends, and volunteers from his old military unit (now at Fort Bragg) to help him provide a solution to the Resovic problem. Hunters and hunted have at each other in a series of bloody encounters in the Tarheel State and points south. At length, the ever armed and dangerous Ty (who seldom misses an opportunity to deliver a sermonette against smoking or in favor of wholesome family values and prayer) finds God on the side of the big guns as he confronts his Serbian nemesis at a rural farmstead where Cullen is held captive. Whatever momentum the wildly improbable narrative manages to gather--thanks to Harvey's modest gift for scenes of violent action--is braked by constant moralizing and posturing. For readers with a high tolerance for redneck self-righteousness and machismo. -- Copyright ©1996, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

From Publishers Weekly:

From the quick-clutch first sentence ("I didn't want to shoot him, I really didn't"), first-novelist Harvey (whose nonfiction includes The Hunter's Rifle) establishes himself as a writer possessed of cool control. Narrator Tyler Vance, is, like his creator, an author of books about guns. He's also a former Army "specialist" trained in wet work and dirty tricks, dad to a four-year-old son and seemingly incapable of avoiding trouble. The man Tyler doesn't want to shoot in the opening line is one of two bank robbers dead by his hand in the first scene. The remainder of the novel concerns Tyler's efforts to save his son, and other relations and friends, from the dead men's vengeful partners. Drugs and weapon sales fit into the muscular story line as well. Tyler is tough but sentimental enough to avoid being hard-boiled, rather like Robert B. Parker's Spenser, and he's as much of a smart-mouth as the Boston PI. The first adventure of this lethal weapon in human form zips along in pared-down prose. If only Harvey can learn to refrain from occasional archness ("I left before I had to bear further brunt"), readers should enjoy the promised second as much as this one.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Putnam Adult
• Publication date: 1996
• ISBN 10: 0399141561
• ISBN 13: 9780399141560
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 228