Untraceable – Sergei Lebedev

What a disappointment.
 
Halting and wooden, weighed down by unremarkable recollection and precious little action. So much soporific backstory that there is no real main story. Above all, it’s confusing. Who the characters are and how they fit together and what is happening is unfathomable. And for some reason, there’s a reluctance to name the countries where the significant players are.
 
It is not even interesting. There is no tension. Scraps of information that contribute nothing and are included simply because the author had made a note of them. “Maxim machine guns, thirsty for water when fired, were mounted on wooden machine gun tables.” Water is not an issue, adds nothing, and is irrelevant. So are the guns in the island’s potted history which tells no human story. I found it impossible to like or sympathize with any of the characters. The assassin sent to kill the scientist apparently feels (hackneyed trope) sympathy for his prey: we only know this because the narrator says so. There is no sense of urgency or need to eliminate the scientist who, like the reader, might just as well die of bored old age.
 
Accumulated phrases of heaped words, sentences that drop at the end with the same leaden cadence.
 
If only it had been written by Graham Greene.