Pun Salad

This is the second entry in a trilogy; I blogged about the first book, Prayers for the Assassin, here.

The author, Robert Ferrigno, has set his series in a near-future dystopia. Nuclear explosions in New York City and Washington DC have led to an Islamist takeover of most of the US, most of the remainder being the "Bible Belt", roughly the old Confederacy. (Map here.) Our hero is Rakkim, the super-deadly "Assassin" of the title. After the events of the first book, the Islamic Republic has been shaken. A threat is detected in the Bible Belt, where the search is on for a powerful weapon hidden away by the previous regime. Rakkim's task is to infiltrate the Belt, either stealing the weapon or rendering it harmless.

There's a prodigious level of inventive violence, intrigue, betrayal and suspense, and dollops of sex in between. Ferrigno is a very good writer, and (if you're willing to suspend disbelief a bit) he's crafted a very complete and thought-out world. Life is very cheap, global warming has messed things up a lot, but you can still get a cup of coffee in a diner.

Ferrigno's villains are nasty indeed, and most of them will (apparently) be back in the final book of the trilogy. Which is out now in hardcover; the paperback is due out in August, which I have on order from Amazon.