NOBODY’S HERO, MW Craven

‘He has a cat?’ Cunningham nodded. ‘One of those creepy-ass breeds. Bald as an egg. More wrinkles than Yoda. He follows it around the block on a leash. Looks like he’s taking his balls for a walk.’

The first book in this series, FEARLESS, was British writer MW Craven shamelessly going for the Jack Reacher audience. It wasn’t his best, his grasp of American idiom is shaky in places, and he had to lay a lot of foundation.

Here’s the core: Ben Koenig has a neurological condition that means he can’t experience fear. He was a US Marshal, and that fearlessness convinced his boss that this meant Koenig could be turned into a high-value asset, so he sent Koenig off across the world to train with the scariest military forces on the planet. This didn’t work out so well, and now Koenig is a drifter with a five million dollar bounty on his head. But he’s still considered a government asset, and is tracked and handled by Jen Draper, an ex-spook who now runs a private intelligence company. They hate each other.

With that out of the way, you can now enjoy NOBODY’S HERO, in which Craven relaxes. It’s the sort of weird caper more usually found in his cosy-ish-crime Washington Poe series. The Poe books internally rail against the cosy-crime concept: you can all but hear Craven’s dark side rattling the bars. No need for that in the Koenig books. He seems to have realised that in the Koenig books he doesn’t have to be nice or cute, and his enjoyment of that ripples off the pages.

If you enjoy high-level shit-talking before something appalling is done to someone in terrible detail, this is your book. Koenig is, as he is often accused of being by Draper, a complete fucking arsehole. In this book, Craven leans into it, stepping past the Reacherisms into what is basically voluble psychopathy. He is less the white knight errant than a terrifying guy with a brain injury who is trying to do the right thing.

(And if you’ve read the Poe books? There’s a crossover that made me smile.)

NOBODY’S HERO is a riotous entertainment, and Craven here cracks that Dan Brown chaptering style in a way that’s more fun to read than Brown’s own. It’s funny, extremely violent and well built. Future-forecasting types may also enjoy the plan to destroy America herein, which Craven works out in enough detail to make his next attempt to secure an ESTA challenging.

NOBODY’S HERO, MW Craven (UK) (US+)