The Perfect Assassin by: Ward Larsen

Wow, that sums it up. This is an amazing piece of work. From start to finish Ward keeps you on the edge of your seat. If you are looking for a great Spy novel this is the one. Jump in and grab a copy today!

Rating: 4.3 out of 5 stars with over 93 reviews

What are people saying:

This has it all

Ward Larsen’s 1st work is great – Has all the components to please just about anyone – Spy thriller, assassins, romance, race to avoid disaster, redemption…Larsen’s David Slaton reminds me a little of David Silva’s Gabriel Allon – both have had personal tragedies in their lives, both are proud of their ancestry, both excellent agents. It also does, as someone referred to, remind me of a Tom Clancy work, without the detailsdetailsdetails – in other words Perfect Assassin is a complete reader’s dream. You will enjoy it.

A promising debut novel

Sailing solo across the Atlantic westward from France Dr. Christine Palmer, just finished with her third year of residency, pulls aboard a man clinging to a cooler amid the flotsam of a shipwreck. Christine’s stumbling across the man in the middle of the ocean is a bit of needle-in-a-haystack good luck that she comes to wish had never happened. Her unexpected passenger–whose name, we eventually learn, is David Slaton–soon commandeers the boat and orders her to sail to England. It is, for Christine, the unpleasant start of a harrowing adventure that will see the two of them running simultaneously from Scotland Yard and from rogue elements within the Israeli secret service.

Ward Larsen tells his story from multiple points of view, his principal characters given just enough back story to make them sympathetic. Perhaps the most compelling of the lot is the Yard’s Inspector Nathan Chatham, first introduced in chapter eight, a charming technophobe who is clever and quirky enough to anchor his own series. It is a pleasure, too, to watch our hero outsmart his adversaries using the training of a lifetime of service in Mossad. We certainly come to like Larsen’s characters enough to want them to prevail, but it’s also true that we are never really made to worry about them. Christine and David are placed in peril repeatedly in the book, but we never doubt that they will both come out safe in the end. Part of the reason for this may be that the bad guys never emerge as fully realized characters. There is no flesh-and-blood villain to root against.

Larsen’s debut novel may not pack the sort of suspense that will keep you turning the pages too late at night, but it’s a solid spy novel and a good quick read. I’ll look forward to seeing more from this author.

Nice Try, But Flawed Effort

Larsen is a Daniel Silva wannabe but, unfortunately, he comes up short. But his miss is not great and perhaps this promising writer, after a few more efforts, will someday achieve the status he seeks. The problem with “The Perfect Assassin” is that it’s one of those thrillers which essentially amount to a 300-page chase to capture a misunderstood assassin who is really a good guy. And it’s one of those breathless books in which several months’ worth of activity takes place in a few days. The thin plot is predictable and is laden with laughable coincidence after coincidence which enable the hero to survive throughout the book. One of those coincidences is the female character who JUST HAPPENS to be sailing a boat across the Atlantic when the so-called assassin is about to drown, and WHO JUST HAPPENS to be a doctor, which will enable her to save his life later on, and so on. You know the kind of book I’m talking about — think a poor Robert Ludlum. However, I did enjoy the book and read it through to the very predictable end. Not the best thriller I’ve read, but not the worst, either.