Book Review: Uncertain Terms

Here we go, folks.  My review of Patrick J. O’Brian‘s latest offering, Uncertain Terms.  Get to know a little more about this great book below, then pick up your copy at the link I just included!

***Mild spoilers below***

Michael Brogan was a good cop, unlike the rest of his family.  He moved halfway across the country, from Chicago to Boston, to distance himself from their mistakes and reputations.  Or so he thought.  His world all comes crashing down one afternoon when he wakes up in a cell while the local news runs the story of his murder.  Now it’s up to him to atone for his family’s transgressions.  He’s introduced to an unknown agency that likes to keep secrets and isn’t everything they lead on to be.  However, through working with them and their seemingly endless resources, he’s able to do some good work and have a positive impact on the world around him, even if nobody knows it’s him. 

O’Brian builds a great cast of characters with incredible depth and complexities.  He shows the difficulties and frustrations of real-life investigations and information-gathering, even with the aid of state-of-the-art tools.  I already mentioned the vast resources provided to the main character, and one thing in particular grabbed my attention early on in the book, and it’s probably not what you would expect.  There are a few mentions while Brogan is walking through the facility’s garage and lays his eyes on a Dodge Viper, but doesn’t get the right opportunity to take advantage of its abilities, which was rather disappointing.

One thing that I kind of missed was a little more information surrounding Brogan’s siblings.  We get a great setup about his dad being a corrupt Chicago cop, and we learn about his brothers staying in the family police business.  There are insinuations made about how they might not be on the straight-and-narrow, but we don’t really get to see what that entails.  Hopefully there will be a sequel to this great book that will delve deeper into this matter.

With that being said, this book quickly became my favorite of O’Brian’s offerings.  He does an impeccable job of building internal tension within the main character based on his predicament, as well as presenting external conflict with nearly every other character he interacts with.  This story was very well crafted and highly enjoyable.  I can’t recommend it enough, and I’ll leave it here with 4.5 Geena Davis’s out of 5.  (You’ll have to read the book to understand the rating!)