Book Review: Fear City

Fear City (Repairman Jack: The Early Years)by F. Paul WilsonTor, 2014The latest "Repairman Jack" novel by F. Paul Wilson, Fear City, is actually the second book in that rip-snorting series to feature the Twin Towers of New York's World Trade Center on its cover. Back in 2009, Wilson's book Ground Zero managed to interweave two or three dozen 9-11 conspiracy theories into an action-narrative in which his slightly enigmatic and supremely dangerous hero, "Repairman" Jack, does what he always does: chases bad guys, wisecracks to bad guys, and then pummels bad guys into unrecognizable heaps of goo.The reason the Towers are still standing on the cover of Fear City is because we've gone back in time; this is the third and final installment in Wilson's series of books showing readers Jack - The Early Years, when our hero was in his late teens and early twenties and just learning how to chase and wisecrack (he seems to have come by the pummeling genetically; he probably throat-punched his delivery nurse); it's 1993, and the World Trade Center towers are standing tall.But as readers will know from the date, the Towers aren't unthreatened. Wilson sets his novel in New York in the week before a group of terrorists detonated a truck bomb underneath the North Tower in the hopes of bringing down both the North and South Towers. Pakistani terrorist leader Khaled Sheik Mohammed sponsored a group including Ramzi Yousef, Mohammed Salameh, and others to strike this blow against imperial America, and Wilson places these characters - and a fictional creation, Kadir Allawi, who acts as a useful composite figure through which Wilson can work in the minimum but necessary amounts of exposition he needs - at the heart of his book. He shows us this crew in the furtive stages of their preparations, stewing in their hatred:

The frigid February wind off the Hudson cut through Kadir Allawi's fatigue jacket. He stood on the dock by the Central Railroad Terminal with Mahmoud, Kasi, Salameh, and Yousef. Jersey City sprawled behind them, Ellis Island sat off to the right, but their attention was riveted across the river on the twin towers of the World Trade Center."You truly believe it is possible?" Kadir said in Arabic.Yousef nodded. "Properly placed within the base, the right bomb will topple the north tower into the south tower, bringing down both."

Another and far more sympathetic character in Fear City is Allawi's sister Hadya, who hates the reactionary Al-Qaeda leaders who have transformed her brother into the fanatic he is today; she worries that if Kadir and his crew of terrorists succeed in committing some monstrous crime, a tenuous peace might be disrupted:

She shuddered, and not from the cold wind blowing down the street. The Americans she'd met in her two years here were good people. They knew nothing about Islam. She knew they thought Muslims dressed funny, but she'd experienced no prejudice, no hate. She doubted hey ever gave a second thought to Muslims as they went about their workaday lives. But if Kadir and his fanatic friends brought terror here, Americans would start thinking about Muslims, and they would not be good thoughts.

Meanwhile, our hero himself is at loose ends, enjoying occasional sexual dalliances with the beautiful and free-spirited Cristin Ott (as any action-novel reader can intuit from such a description, she meets a spectactulary gruesome end) but wondering what he should do with his life. Various under-the-counter offers of work keep coming his way, but they're all in the hitman line, and although this might seem like a good match for the aforementioned pummeling skills, Jack wants his savage violence to be conducted in a higher cause - after all, only barbarians finger-pop eyeballs just for the fun of it.Into this void comes Dane Bertel, whom Wilson describes as "a composite of all the knowledgeable people shouting warnings that Islamic terror was on its way to the U.S. but who were ignored at every level." Part of the initial tension of Fear City comes from the reader wondering if Jack himself will be one of the levels at which Bertel's warnings are ignored, and Wilson charges those warnings about Muslims with as much 20-20 hindsight as he reasonably can:

"Most of them are decent, hard-working folks who just want to earn their daily bread and raise their families, and maybe see a better future, which will never come because their religion mires them in the past. But that's not my business. Everyone choose their own path. The enemies are the psycho-sickos like Sheikh Omar and his minions who think it's their divine mission to make all the world bow to Allah. They hide behind the skirts of their religion and kill noncombatants."

Bertel has been following Kadir Allawi and his terrorist crew since they assembled in New York, and he's convinced they're intending some unprecedented strike against the city. He wants Jack's help watching them, and soon the two men are working together and racing the clock to first figure out and then stop that strike from happening.As in every single one of his twenty-something Repairman Jack novels (this is an action series no fan of action series should miss), Wilson propels his narrative along at such a brisk pace that the reader is never even slightly tempted to stop turning pages, and one sure mark of the book's old-hand confidence is just how much of that narrative is simple dialogue. Jack and his friends are quickly drawn into a violent tangle of plots involving both terrorists and the Italian Mob (the Mafia bits are imperfectly grafted onto the rest of the book, but they're so funny and gripping you wouldn't want to see them go), and even before the story is a third done, Wilson is busily, merrily racking up the body-count.The ending is a foregone conclusion, of course. The terrorists did indeed plant a truck loaded with over a thousand pounds of urea nitrate-hydrogen, and the explosion did indeed take place. Six people were killed and hundreds more were injured, but neither tower fell. The fact that Wilson can generate so much genuine momentum and suspense even though his readers know how the story ends is a testament to his first-rate hack writing skills. And natually, he works in an ingenious hidden dimension to the plot, to keep Jack occupied.There's a good deal of appeal in this younger, less experienced Jack, a still-fallible guy just starting to figure out what he wants to do with his life; it would be a shame if this really were the last we see of him. I'd urge Wilson to give us another trilogy of "Early Years" novels, but since this is a guy who's written fifty novels in 38 years, I'm guessing he won't need much urging.