Book #51 - Night of the Assassin

I loved the John Rain series from Barry Eisler, and I thought I'd try something else. Night of the Assassin is a prequel to another series, the Kind of Swords. It's not usually the type of book I read, but it captured my interest and I had a hard time putting it down.

Mexico has become a land of cartels, which have become crazy rich. The leaders are men earning tens or hundreds of millions of dollars a month. They pay their protection well, and as a result the men are loyal, and brutal. There are regular killings and wars, with deaths creating power vacuums.

This is a look back book. An assassin makes an amazing kill at the beginning, and then we go back to the point when he was the son of a cartel leader, learning to be a man. Growing up as a teenager, being mentored and taught to control his body, become a warrior, and be strong. The book follows his life, and then his turn into an assassin for hire, the best in the world.

It's exciting, and action packed, but also a little gruesome at times. Not graphic, but detailed enough descriptions of how bad people are treated sometimes made me a little ill in places. Definitely it made me not want to travel outside the US into Mexico anymore. It's fiction, but somewhat disturbing.