War Machine: A Yellowthread Street Mystery (Marshall, William Leonard, Yellowthread Street Mystery.)

Rating:
Summary: War Machine
Review: More fire and noise from William Marshall. But once again, it works.

I read a slew of this author's Yellowthread Street novels a while ago, enjoyed all of them, and then realized I only had one left in my stash: War Machine. So I saved it til now. Now I have none left, but can safely say that Marshall does tend to resort to the same trick over again--that of having his detectives (Feiffer, Auden, Spencer, and O'Yee...uh, well okay, O'Yee is usually stuck on the phone somewhere else when the shooting starts, but NOT this time!) close in on the "killer unmasked", in dank tunnels, or a creepy warehouse, or a corridor-ridden mansion, or a crowded Hong Kong street. Chaos ensues, the detectives don't know where to shoot, the killer knows the layout, and there may be boobytraps, walls collapsing, tunnels flooding, explosions galore.

War Machine excels at this; it is the epitome of William Marshall's passion for pyrotechnics, and all chaos breaking loose once Feiffer and the gang know where to go to corner a dangerous madman (or woman). Of course one must expect grand mayhem when the premise seems to be that a killer, or killers, with a horrible agenda, have discovered a forty-year-old, gigantic hidden arsenal of Japanese war-time weapons left behind in Hong Kong. Then we have a sprawling fireworks factory thrown into the mix...more potential for big bang. Caves full of methane pockets, vehicles or storage-sheds wired to blow, snipers lurking in the shadows, ready to shoot at anyone who survives the initial TNT boobytrap. War Machine may be the loudest, most explosive Yellowthread Street book, and that's saying something, believe you me!

What saves the novel is what saved Roadshow, Frogmouth, Sci Fi, Far Away Man, even the debut novel: there's a satisfying whodunit to go with all the uncontrolled chaos fronting it. If my reflections on William Marshall's series lead me to decide that he runs a similar story arc in a few of the more incendiary Yellowthread Street books, right up to the oft-explosive manhunt finales, then, on the flipside, every whodunit angle has been different. While wilfully working to be exceptionally loud, jagged, and weird, Marshall takes care to found everything on a fine puzzle, again, here, in War Machine.