Suspense novelist Mark Andrew Olsen's latest book, The Watchers, is an excellent read. A spiritual-thriller-suspense novel, his blunt-force writing grabs your attention. In the opening scene, the narrator’s detached, emotionless voice describes a murder scene that manages to grow in its brutality through his matter-of-fact description:
Pacific Palisades, California—Midnight
The blue flickers of her television danced across the housekeeper’s unmoving pupils. She neither budged a muscle, nor leveled the odd tilt of her head, nor wiped the crimson trickles crisscrossing her neck, nor rose from the stain darkening the sofa cushions beneath her. Nor did she notice that, twenty feet away, a man gripping the weapon of her murder had now reached the bedroom door of her pequena angelica. Her angelic one….. No, deep in the final tremors of her death, the housekeeper did not hear her assailant turn the bedroom’s door handle or see him enter the room. Nor did she scream when he took two padded strides into shadow.
Olsen uses this detached voice to describe all the murders executed by the Order of the Scythe, “fulfilling one of earth’s most necessary and neglected functions - the recycling of an inferior being, culling the herd.”
The hit-men are ex-Delta Force and ex-CIA/NSA black ops men who receive orders targeting bad guys like “African warlords and Balkan drug traffickers.” They cull the world of infamous mass murderers like Serbian general, Radovan Mladov, “imprisoned in the Netherlands World Court Detention Facility — and reminiscent of Slobodan Milosevic, who was indicted by the UN and extradited to the The Hague where he died of a heart attack.
Mladov’s murderer, Dylan Hatfield, started out killing mule deer as a child on his grandmother’s Montana farm. At age 18, the army assigned him to Special Forces’ “solo sanctions” in Afghanistan, Columbia, and Somalia as a “human trigger already pulled.” Now, he trusts in decades-old relationships, receiving orders far from the fringes of national security, and from men whose identities he barely knows. At least his targets are indisputably scumbags - or so he reasons with himself.
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