Short description
FBI rookie Jonathan Malone is recruited for a top-secret mission--a mission that touches on his past. The same man who murdered his parents has come back, hoping to finish the job. With a small team of men, Malone must search out conspiracy on an international level, conspiracy rooted in all the top organizations--FBI, CIA, even the White House.
Review
After 2004's hit, Nightbringer, James Byron Huggins returns with another great book. In The Scam, Huggins hearkens back to the action sequences seen in The Reckoning. The book opens with a child being stalked through his home by a cold assassin who has just murdered the boy's parents. The boy escapes, becoming the killer's only intended victim ever to do so. But the boy gets a good look at the man, and a game begins between them that will stretch for years to come. Over time, the boy (now known as Jonathan Malone) becomes one of the best the FBI has. Now he's been pulled into his first big assignment with a computer hacker named Blackfoot and an anyway-to-get-the-job-done hero named Logan. Their job is to destroy a scam with tendrils reaching into just about every government agency on earth. To do this, they must get to the man in control of it all--a man never seen and known only as Phantom. With no help from the outside, these three men find themselves running from their own agencies as well as killers sent by Phantom--including the assassin named Charon who missed his chance to kill Jonathan years ago when he killed his parents.Huggins has long been considered a master at crafting thrilling action sequences (see just about any scene in Cain to get an example of this) and this book is no exception. The heroes are larger than life men willing to do whatever it takes to see the job through to the end. Huggins has created the perfect hero in Logan, a grizzled agent who has seen enough bureaucracy to last a lifetime, and signs on to the mission fully intending it to be his last--one way or another. He has no qualms about breaking the law to save his men or to see the mission succeed.Blackfoot, a computer hacker that terrified the government so much they hired him to keep him from shutting them down, is a colorful Native American character with enough computer savvy to get into any system on earth. And Malone, a chess prodigy turned FBI agent, has the focus of the group, wanting to find Charon and kill him for what he did to his family.As in previous novels, Huggins creates a villain to truly terrify. Charon (or The Iceman, so called because of his weapon of choice: an ice pick) is an almost supernatural killing machine. Bred by Hitler's scientists at the end of World War 2 as the perfect assassin, Charon can see in the dark as well as most men see in the light (due to photosensitive eyesight--a trait commonly found in albinos) and can move in the shadows almost like a demon.The action escalates throughout the novel as the body count rises until we reach a climax that makes just about any John Woo film seem tame in comparison. Huggins is an author not afraid to put his heroes through the wringer before the story ends, and he does so with perfection here.Because of the intricacies of the scam itself, there are pages dedicated to explaining the inner workings of what's going on behind the scenes and the reason Phantom must be stopped. These sequences are handled well though, with the machinations of the scam being scattered throughout the story rather than a huge dump of information at once.The Scam starts with a bang and doesn't let up until the end. And when the dust settles, you're left with a great story and a tremendously satisfying read for fans of action thrillers. -Brian Reaves, Infuze Magazine