It is not just in the fight scenes, though, that Eisler shows his talent. His books are much more than the literary equivalent of a Bruce Lee movie — a pitfall that some who essay similar stories often fall prey to. Eisler is a gifted stylist and his prose is as good as what anyone else can deliver in this genre.

When Rain takes a train ride through Japan's countryside, Eisler describes the view so perfectly that his narrative unspools like a movie in one's mind. At the same time, he uses the scene to make the reader aware that Rain's journey is through a unique setting, a place very different from our own in both its landscape and culture:

A sliver of sun had broken through the clouds at the edge of the horizon, shining like a sepia spotlight through an otherwise gray and undifferentiated firmament, and in the fading moments of the day I looked on at the scenes without, scenes that passed before me as disconnected and mute as images in a silent film. A rice paddy in the distance, tended by a lone woman, who seemed lost in its sodden expanse. A man tiredly peddling a bicycle, his dark suit seeming almost to sag from his frame as though wanting nothing more than to cease this purposeless forward momentum and succumb to gravity's heavy embrace. A child with a yellow knapsack paused before the lowered gate of the rapito railroad crossing, perhaps on his way to a juku, or cram school, which would stuff his head with facts for the next dozen years until it was time for them to be disgorged for college entrance exams.

John Rain remains one of the most fascinating characters in crime fiction, an intriguing, troubling man, made different from the rest of us by his unique and horrible skills. When I reviewed Eisler's first book, Rain Fall, in 2002, I described his protagonist as "a multifaceted killer with the soul of a poet." That depiction has only been reinforced by the subsequent two books.

Rain boasts a depth that is all too rare in your typical action thriller. This is ably demonstrated by his musings upon returning to the home he was forced to flee, in Hard Rain, while avoiding capture:

I took a final look around, trying to recollect the life that I once had here. There was a feeling that lingered, certainly, something insubstantial that expressed its longing for corporeity in the form of a series of long sighs, but nothing I could really grasp. The interior of the town was just the same, yes, and yet, imbued with the unfair weight of my memories, it was now all hauntingly changed. I didn't belong here anymore, and I felt like an apparition, something unnatural that was right to have left and foolish to have returned.