Prince of Deadly Weapons - Softcover

While still wracked with guilt over the supposed suicide of his only son, Taylor, wealthy Sacramento Delta developer Nathan Greene meets Dane Rudd, a young man who'd lost his vision in a subway attack years ago and only regained it through the posthumous transplanting of Taylor's corneas. Nathan is now putting together a research center in his son's name, and he needs Rudd as his guileless pitchman, "the miracle of modern science he'll troop out to fund-raisers." But the enigmatic Rudd has his own agenda, which could lay Nathan--as well as an avaricious banker; a randy, paraplegic district attorney with political ambitions; and a pair of brutish sibling pilots--open to charges in a conspiracy that involves money laundering, missing diamonds, and murder.

Although the pseudonymous Teran gets off a clever line here and there (he describes a comely woman as having "legs that went all the way from the ground up and into a man's psyche"), the prose in The Prince of Deadly Weapons is a flabby version of what drew readers to his previous works, God Is a Bullet and Never Count Out the Dead. Equally discouraging, this story's characters never rise above the one-dimensionality of concept, and its plot twists are less accomplished than they are confounding. Despite some fast-pitch episodes of cinematic drama (Rudd's last-minute escape from an onrushing train, exploding boats in the denouement), The Prince of Deadly Weapons lacks the lethal edge that fans have come to expect from this author. --J. Kingston Pierce