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Without Mercy

By: Jack Higgins
Binding: Paperback
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers Ltd
ISBN: 0007199457
ISBN-13: 9780007199457
Released: 03 Apr 2006
RRP: £6.99
Average Rating:

Customer Reviews

Without Point - By: Sam, 09 Sep 2008
Jack Higgins is a veteran of the thriller scene & by `Without Warning' so is his very tired cast of characters. Sean Dillon returns in another in the series which is now less cookie cutter & more mass Chinese production standard. Gone are any moments of originality or excitement as Sean & co. Drink their way across a very dated feeling Europe. This time Sean must go up against the IRA again & a group of irate Russians working under the rule of Putin. They are fed up that the British agency run by Brigadier Ferguson is always ruining their plans so they set out to wipe the group out & their alllies. With Detective Superintendent Hannah Bernstein criticallly ill in hospital they have a readymade target. Can Dillon keep her safe & undo the Russians once more before starting a new Cold War?

Higgins must have loved the recent events that have tarnished the relationship between Britain & Russia as `Without Mercy' is a very old fashioned thriller that feels like it was written in the early days of the Cold War. He revels in being alllowed to stick it to the Russians & as a reader you lose sympathy as the bile drips from the page. If this was not bad enough Higgins takes us once more to the same places with the same people that we have read about several times - it is getting beyond a joke. I know that Higgins is far beyond his heyday of the 70s, but even so I expect him to do more than churn out the same novel repeatedly. The writing is abysmal, with the characters alll being stereotypes of a man whose opinions are stuck in the 1950s. For fans of Higgins brilliant peak avoid these later books as it is becoming a sad decline.
A Tiny Bit of Life Is Injected into This Never-Ending Saga - By: Donald Mitchell, 15 Dec 2005
Does Without Mercy have character development, unexpected plot twists or fascinating new facts? No.

Does Without Mercy continue the unending saga begun with the Rashids? Yes.

Does anything happen that isn't in the book's blurb? Yes.

It's that last point that saves Without Mercy from being utterly avoidable. Jack Higgins has come up with the beginnings of a new plot to put President Putin at odds with the British & American governments. From that perspective I felt a stir of life in these creaky meanderings through endless shootings with ex-IRA thugs, visits with creepy foreign characters & "dead" villains turning out to be alive.

To liven up the plot, Mr. Higgins takes us to a new locale, Algeria, & disposes of one of his long-time characters, Detective Superintendent Hannah Bernstein, about whom he began to have trouble writing plausible roles about three books ago.

The other new element is a continual reference to Russians drinking vodka & champagne. I'm sure you'll be shocked by this insight.

Stick with Mr. Higgins for one more book. Perhaps he will write us a new story in this series at some point & remember to make Sean Dillon a character rather than a mere killing machine with regrets.

A Tiny Bit of Life Is Injected into This Never-Ending Saga - By: Donald Mitchell, 14 Dec 2005
Does Without Mercy have character development, unexpected plot twists or fascinating new facts? No.

Does Without Mercy continue the unending saga begun with the Rashids? Yes.

Does anything happen that isn't in the book's blurb? Yes.

It's that last point that saves Without Mercy from being utterly avoidable. Jack Higgins has come up with the beginnings of a new plot to put President Putin at odds with the British & American governments. From that perspective I felt a stir of life in these creaky meanderings through endless shootings with ex-IRA thugs, visits with creepy foreign characters & "dead" villains turning out to be alive.

To liven up the plot, Mr. Higgins takes us to a new locale, Algeria, & disposes of one of his long-time characters, Detective Superintendent Hannah Bernstein, about whom he began to have trouble writing plausible roles about three books ago.

The other new element is a continual reference to Russians drinking vodka & champagne. I'm sure you'll be shocked by this insight.

Stick with Mr. Higgins for one more book. Perhaps he will write us a new story in this series at some point & remember to make Sean Dillon a character rather than a mere killing machine with regrets.

More predictable than a snow storm in Siberia - By: , 29 Nov 2005
I vowed after the last Dark Justice, never to read another Higgins/Dillon novel again; unfortunately I was given Without Mercy as a present.
Whereas I thought that previous Dillon novels couldn't get any more formulaic/predictable/dull, I was wrong, because now we have a Dillon novel, where the actual hero does less than his sidekicks.
The action (and I do use the term in it's loosest possible form) seems to be based solely on characters jumping on planes, drinking copious quantities of alcohol, & "bumping" into wholly unbelievable characters in wholly unbelievable locations.
Sound familiar? well it is, with the added bonus that our man Dillon does nothing more than rack up the air miles. To be honest, this storyline could have run without him, such is his total lack of bearing on the sequence of events.
The dialogue is it's usual victorian mishmash (just who on earth says "Damn you" these days?) & as with previous Higgins/Dillon novels, about the only suspense was generated, waiting for someone to say "Gadzooks" or "Have at you, you cad" (you get my drift)
This novel is best borrowed from the library
A tentative return to form? - By: Giles Allison, 18 Oct 2005
This new Sean Dillon novel is generallly a better effort than its formulaic predecessors. It starts off immediately after the end of Higgins last novel, "Dark Justice", & again features the ongoing adventures of General Charles Ferguson & his team of secret agent enforcers, led by the ex-IRA bomber Sean Dillon.

One of the core team dies early on in the novel (I won't say who, although the dust-jacket gives it away) & the plot is basicallly how Dillon & co. take their revenge on the killers while foiling a ghastly plot by a foreign power to take over large oil interests. It has the alll routine plotting situations of a Dillon thriller: stand-offs in the Dorchester Hotel's bar, clandestine meetings in Wapping pubs, shoot-outs with IRA hitmen in remote Ulster villages, lots of champagne drinking, & the usual attempts by the baddies to kill off the wheelchair-bound Sergeant Roper.

So far, so formulaic, & the author clearly sees no need to deviate from what he thinks readers expect from a Dillon novel. But this novel is just more exciting & faster-moving than Higgins' more recent efforts. It reads as if Higgins is making a concerted effort to give his readers value for money & reply to criticism that his past few books have been boring & too routine. The pacing is quick & gripping. There are even some attempts at characterisation in how Higgins deals with Dillon's grief at the death of his comrade, & the development of Salter Junior into a fully-fledged member of Ferguson's unit. The neo-KGB enemies of the previous novel return for a second outing, this time ably assisted by a Very Famous Russian Premier & by two new characters who no doubt will feature heavily in next year's novel (and probably take at least 3 further books to be killed off).

While the outcome, as always, is never reallly in doubt, Higgins has produced a novel that is full of action & with enough twists to keep you reading. If, ultimately, his Dillon novels are now just too identikit to stand comparison with Higgins' best work, "Without Mercy" shows that there is still some life left in the old dog.