Perry channels Frederick Forsyth

This is the third Thomas Perry novel I've read and while the story is, on the surface, interesting, I find books written in this style uninteresting. I'm old enough to have read a lot of Frederick Forsyth and this book, and to a lesser extent Mr. Perry's previous book "The Burglar" are reminiscent of Mr. Forsyth's way of writing that is one pounding factual sentence after another style driving straight through the narrative punctuated by minimal dialog or description. "The Old Man", the first of Mr. Perry's books I read, did not strike me this way.

"The Old Man"
https://www.amazon.com/gp/customer-reviews/R3W131UVEHH6DT/ref=cm_cr_getr_d_rvw_ttl?ie=UTF8&ASIN=0802127533

"The Burglar":
https://www.amazon.com/gp/customer-reviews/R1S7DFVRFF9LMM/ref=cm_cr_getr_d_rvw_ttl?ie=UTF8&ASIN=B07LGDZ8JY

I received this book for an honest review from Net Galley.

This is a well thought out book. I think the premise and some of the action is a bit hard to believe, but it is well written and is interesting. I have read other books by the author that I thought a bit better.

Another really strong effort by Perry. He is most definitely on my must read list. This story will pretty much grab you from the start and keeps you turning pages until the end. Lots of action and some good twists and turns. Good stuff.

Leah is an interesting character. Sort of a female Jack Reacher. Or going further back - a Charles Bronson character from the movies - bent on being a vigilante. The character is well written and the premise is interesting but somewhere along the way it got to be just one killing after another at breakneck speed. It just didn't seem very plausible and it felt like a video game with bad guys dropping left and right. Then the ending seemed rather rushed. Bad guys dead, ok - moving on to a few years in the future. Didn't the FBI ever wonder how all this happened? Wasn't any law enforcement the least bit inquisitive about Leah?

A good book for someone who likes a lot of action. I liked it ok but didn't love it.

This book was given to me by the publisher in return for an honest review. May contain spoilers.

This book is about a prison break that completely devestated a town, and an officers need for revenge two years later. We start out with the prison break. 12 prisoners plot an escape, which also allows other prisoners to escape. It alludes to these prisoners kidnapping, murdering, and raping members of a nearby town. I am grateful the author didn't describe these acts. He was able to convey how terrible this was without having to go into detail. Two years later a cop goes acts out her revenge by murdering the 12.

This book wasn't bad but it also wasn't that great. It was okay. The main character of Leah was well thought out, which I can appreciate. However, everything just felt too fast. If the author could have slowed down a little in regards to what Leah was doing, it would have been a bit better. Also, you get insights into some of the prisoners, yet their appearance in the book was short lived. It was a bit better towards the end in regards to that matter. All of the exciting parts were moved through too quickly, which lost me. If the book had been a bit longer, I think it would have been a really nice read. Would I recommend this? Probably. It's not terrible and if you like revenge plots, you might like this.

A Small Town is an intriguing story about a prison breakout that almost crippled this small town until they decided to fight back. You'll be intrigued and will not be able to put this book down until the end. Some characters might be over the top but, you'll enjoy it none the less.

Love books that have more than 1 villian in it because you are debating on who the top one is. Well this book has a lot and it was interesting reading until the last chapter where it was rushed to end the book. Still would recommend and buy as gift because what I think is rushed another person may not.

I previously read The Burglar and was not impressed after the Jane Whitefield series. Thomas Perry, has however, redeemed himself in my eyes with A Small Town.
The biggest employer in Weldonville is the Weldonville Federal Penitentiary, until one night a group of 12 inmates lead a mass escape. A blood bath ensues and all but decimates the town and the lives of it's inhabitants.

Two years on and the FBI have still not managed to recapture the 12 ringleaders. Leah, the town police chief, decides to hunt down the 12 herself and make them pay.

I felt that Leah was well-characterised, female leads in action novels can be very stereotyped. They tend to either be helpless and depending on a hero to assist or the authors feel the need to strip them of any femininity.

There are POV switches with each criminal and their back story but the story as a whole focuses on Leah, so they are not in anyway distracting.

Thank you to #Netgalley and #MysteriousPress for the advanced copy of #ASmallTown in exchange for my honest review.

I can't quite decide how to review this. I loved the beginning and the main character. The plot just seemed implausible. And quite a lot of violence.
Still, good writing.

A small town doesn’t die just once but twice. First the citizens have no real choice to keep their town alive unless they accept the building of a prison that will supposedly house white collar criminals. This becomes far from the truth, though, and the hard-core prisoners plot and overtake the prison one hot night in July. The core twelve open the floodgates for the prison population and attack the citizens without warning. No one can find them. The case is being closed. The town will die a second time.
Now, though, one woman with deep ties to the town is determined to track down every one of these men and bring them to the kind of justice that is secret and backed by her town’s mayor and council. Do you think this kind of vengeance is dead? Would you look the other way or back police Lt. Leah Hawkins? What if it were your husband, wife, friend or someone you knew and loved that had been killed that night in July? Will Leah succeed in what she admits is murder?
Thomas Perry is capable of not only giving us a thriller with all of the emotions to go with it, but he has given us the workings of the minds of both hunter and hunted. These facts make “A Small Town” believable and the characters alive.

Thomas Perry writes good books. This one is no exception! This book is about a prison break, many prisoners break out and havoc ensues in the small town near the prison. A dozen are still out there unfound, the guys that planned the prison break. A local cop is given the task of tracking them down. I don't want to give too much of the plot away, so I'll leave it at that. The characterization is well done, and it is a page turner. Very enjoyable.

The book started off well, introducing us to the residents of a small town who work at the local prison. It kept my attention through the altercation at the prison and the aftermath that left a town broken. It kept my attention through the acting police officer taking things into her own hands to help the town try to put this behind them in her non official capacity.
Where it started to lose me was after half of the criminals had been taken care of. The off the grid community just didn't feel right. The writing seemed to be too descriptive and had less action, but the part that annoyed me was the use of first and last names being used repeatedly on the same page for many of the characters. How many times did they need to be referred to by both names? It started to feel like getting paid per word and lost me faster as that kept up. I started skimming. The last few pages were a disappointment as it felt thrown together, to seal it all up. If we could give half stars, I"d give it a 2.5.
Thank you NetGalley for an advance reader copy in exchange for an honest opinion.

Distinctly different
In fact probably one of the most unique books read this year
The basic story is that Weldonville, a smallish town in America has a maximum security prison on it’s borders, it shadows the town, affords it jobs and a level of prosperity and they live in a comfortablish if not wholly trusting companionship
That is until one night, when a plan that has taken months if not years to hatch finally happens and the gates
of the prison are opened and hundreds of prisoners escape and make their way to the town
Once there they murder, rape and pillage at will and cause mayhem, the town is left bereft and sickened and will never be the same again
Fast forward on 2 years and the 12 instigators of the deed are known and are still at large
No one can find them
Leah Hawkins intends to change that and with the help from the town of funds to ‘make the town more secure’ sets out to track them down
And what follows is an in depth look at how she goes about this and what happens to the 12, it’s way more than a ‘ theres 1, bang’ kind of story as she plays the most superb game of ‘finders keepers’ looking for the most ruthless men who had done everything to avoid detection, or so they thought
Truly fascinating, well written and explained as to be intricate in detail but not alienate the reader
I loved it and the tension and excitement that was there from page 1 the author managed to keep going right through the story
Violent nasty characters pitied against Leah who to say was determined would be doing her a disservice
10/10
5 Stars

Thomas Perry knows how to write abs how to make you feel for characters. In that way, the book succeeds. The wonton violence, though. from both good and bad characters was too much.
This was too bad as in every other way, i enjoyed this book.

Thomas Perry, a highly acclaimed mystery writer, takes us to a little community in Colorado that sits in the shadow of a huge federal prison. “A Small Town” tells of a massive prison break, engineered by twelve dangerous inmates, that sets a thousand inmates loose in the little, defenseless town, resulting in the rape and/or death of many of its citizens and much property damage. Most of the participants are soon rearrested with the exception of the twelve that orchestrated the outbreak.

Vindictive city officials secretly recruit their own police Lt. Leah Hawkins, who lost a lover during the rampage, to track down the offenders and kill them. The resourceful and relentless Hawkins quickly disposes of six but the remaining felons soon figure out that they are targets and plan counterattacks from an Arkansas survivalist camp. Some critics have cited a lack of morality explanations and shallow characters as detractors from the story. I personally didn’t find that to be a big issue with Perry’s story, finding, instead, that it was well-written and suspenseful, with strong dialogue and vivid scenarios.

Great writers such as Stephen King have lauded Perry’s efforts on past works but, having never read them, I have no opinion about their quality. I can say, with Small Town, that I found it well written and don’t hesitate to recommend it.

This book started with a massive, quite violent prison break. When the twelve master minds of the break get away a small town police officer is hired as a vigilante to track them down and kill them making this book completely unrealistic! Not being a fan of vigilante justice, this was not a book I enjoyed nor one I would recommend.

I would have given this book five stars, apart from two points made by other reviewers:

1. It requires a small suspension of disbelief because it does seem unlikely that a small town cop would be able to track down the 10 inmates that masterminded their escape from a penitentiary along with a large number of other inmates, and killed many of the townspeople acquiring the resources they needed to get away.

2. The last chapter was weak in comparison with the rest of the book.

However, the part I most enjoyed was the overall plot. The book almost read like a true-crime novel, recounting in detail the steps that Leah, the highest ranking officer left alive in Weldonville after July 19, took to find the escaped inmates. She was extremely resourceful, intelligent, and quick-witted.

I also really appreciated the fact that the main character was a female. It was refreshing to see a woman in this type of a role, because it is typically a man who is seen in a hunter-type role. And while I wouldn't ordinarily enjoy a "I'm going to hunt you down and kill you" type story, there is enough back story of the town and its inhabitants to make me actually root for her success. I enjoyed the way that the scenario with each of the individual or groups of escaped prisoners was differently and required her to come up with unique strategies for approaching exacting her revenge.

Thanks to Net Galley and The Mysterious Press for an ARC in exchange for an honest review.

I have always been a fan of Thomas Perry so I was pleased when Net Galley offered an advance copy of Perry's most recent book. I didn't think it measured up to the previous titles of his I enjoyed. There's no mystery. We know the why, how, what and where of the bad guys and the same for the heroine who would appear to have almost superwoman capabilities. 

Leah, the police lieutenant, "hired" (it's all supposed to be off the books) is given virtually unlimited funds (which she spends wisely, mind you) to murder (there is no other word for it) a bunch of convicts who had engineered a vast prison break and then had savaged the local community. Her motives appear to be focused on revenge for the killing of her married lover (the adultery was OK because his wife was in a wheelchair) during a shootout with the bad guys following the breakout.

That she's more than competent at tracking down the scoundrels is never at issue, and her techniques flawless and filled with mounds of luck. It goes without saying she is athletic, tall, blonde and beautiful and probably eats right most of the time.

It's a perfect book for a plane ride: distracting enough but not so much that drifting off once in a while would be bothersome to its rather wrinkled flow.

My thanks to Net Galley.

I thought the story was pretty good. It was interesting. Had great potential. I liked the plot twists. Leah Hawkins is searching for the 12 escapees that wreaked havoc on July 19 th. Some of the most dangerous inmates housed at Weldonville engineered an escape plan that allowed one of the largest prison breaks. Now 2 years later, Leah goes across country searching for the 12.

Excellent, one of the best books I’ve read this year. A prison has been located in a small town in Colorado. Originally intended to be a minimum security prison,it soon houses mostly violent criminals, due to overcrowding at other prisons.

Twelve of these inmates meticulously plot an escape, and soon the small town is overrun by over a thousand escapees. They steal what they want, rape and kill, but after most of the inmates are rounded up, the masterminds are still at large.

After two years neither the police nor the FBI have any leads, so a female police lieutenant, with the secret blessing of the town leaders, sets out to find and kill them in order to bring some closure to the townspeople and justice for the slain.

I loved the amount of detail in the book. Highly recommended.

I was given an I corrected advance frog from Mysterious Press and NetGalley in return for an honest review.