The Silenced is the fourth in the Jonathan Quinn series, the creation of California’s Brett Battles.  Battles picked up a Barry Award for his second effort, The Deceived, and his breakneck espionage thrillers have won him many admirers, not least Jeffery Deaver, whose gushing blurb adorns Battles’ latest dust jacket.

In this most recent addition to the series, Quinn receives an unusual task; remove the remains of a body hidden in a condemned London office block.  The identity of the corpse is a mystery, but the danger surrounding the job is evident.  Quinn and his team are under surveillance by an unknown rival organisation, and the job threatens not just his team, but Quinn’s nearest and dearest.

Quinn is a professional ‘cleaner,’ tasked not with assassinations, but with disposing of the evidence after the wet work has been completed.   The role affords him a certain morality and ethical code that would seem ludicrous were he to work at the front-end.  He reserves the right to refuse jobs should the client not meet his standards, and is spared the difficulty of having to kill in cold blood for profit.  For this reason, and (in The Silenced particularly) for his compassion towards friends and family, he is a likeable lead.

However, The Silenced is by no means a character-driven piece, instead relying on Battles’ breathless pace.  His prose is strictly business; cool and efficient in keeping with his leading man’s profession.  This approach gives the narrative a sense of understatement; there are car chases, shoot-outs, double-crosses and showdowns, all the ingredients of the classic spy novel, but at no point do the events seem contrived or absurd.  Instead, Battles keeps it low-key and effective, giving an air of real credibility to a plot which is, should you pause to catch your breath and consider it, actually quite implausible.

A similar approach is taken when establishing setting.  Battles is a well-travelled writer, and while this is evident from the knowledgeable way his characters navigate Hong Kong, London, Los Angeles and the rest of the glamorous locations, at no point does he wallow in the opulence of his surroundings.  As a result, Battles avoids turning his novel into a travelogue, and in doing so nods to the borderless, itinerant existence of the modern intelligence agent, where loyalty and national identity are at a premium.

Battles’ critics have pointed, not entirely without justification, to paucity of character, or to a lack of colour in his prose.  In The Silenced, Battles expands his characters, examining their relationships, and including enough human drama to engage the reader without distracting from the business of a pedal-to-the-metal thriller.  Brevity is, after all, the soul of wit, and Battles covers in a few brief paragraphs what another author may have laboured over across several pages.  In terms of prose, Battles does indeed eschew lengthy establishing sequences or chunks of internal monologue, but in doing so, achieves plausibility without the need for the tiresome regurgitation of facts which has blighted so many thrillers.  However, presentation is ever a matter of preference, and while Battles’ voice is both distinctive and effective, it is by no means poetic.

Overall though, as summer read, doubts over style should be assuaged by some accomplished plotting; The Silenced is a pacey, well-executed thriller from an author who knows his way around a plot structure as intimately as the best in the business.

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