Private Wars : : a Queen & Country Novel

Locations
Call Number: Mystery
On Shelf At: Downtown Library

Location & Checkout Length	Call Number	Checkout Length	Item Status
Downtown 2nd Floor 4-week checkout	Mystery	4-week checkout	On Shelf

COMMUNITY REVIEWS

Wonderfully intelligent but depictions of torture make it hard to read. submitted by eknapp on February 6, 2014, 12:37pm British special ops ace Tara Chace returns for a series of missions in Uzbekistan. [some HUGE spoilers ahead]

[Seriously. I'm giving the big finale away. You've been warned.]

After taking a couple years off to have a baby and brood over the death of the father (in the previous book, I inferred), Chace is roped back into the game for an off-the-books attempt to replace the vicious, rapey president of Uzbekistan with someone less evil.

The subtitle could have been "The Horrors of Torture". The reader is treated to beatings, maimings, gang rape, and death by boiling (though none of it is gratuitous.) It's an attempt at indictment. I say 'attempt' because when Rucka makes the obligatory assertion that torture is ultimately useless (the victim will say anything to make it stop), he later on the SAME PAGE has it be successful, with the torturer getting the information he wanted. Oops.

When it wasn't turning my stomach, Private Wars was dazzling. Excellent, realistic spycraft and logistics, complex and believable international politics, realistic action sequences. And just a wonderful, awful ending--Chace is forced to kill the 'good' guy, while his 2 year old son clings frantically to his legs, to prevent him from taking revenge on the Uzbekistani president who had his wife raped and tortured to death--that demonstrates how terrible duty can be.