The Will Of The Wisp by Edward Ahern – Book Review

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The Will Of The Wisp is an action filled story of high stakes crime, intrigue, and tangled emotions. Its characters, good and bad, are flawed.

The novel opens with the narrator agreeing to administer the estate of a former lover who committed suicide, and quickly moves into multiple layers of deception and danger. As the mayhem mounts, a complex set of plots and counterplots is revealed, as is the persistence of love despite betrayal.

‘The Will of the Wisp’ is the latest work from the pen of American-based author, Ed Ahern. We meet our main protagonist, Tom Sinclair, an army veteran turned cybersecurity independent contractor, who possesses a photographic memory. After receiving a phone call, he finds his ex-lover, Angela Fuchs, has been killed in a car accident, leaving him as executor of her substantial and complex estate. This will be a far from easy assignment owing to her dodgy business dealings with some ruthless associates who want their pound of flesh. However, when he hears of her death, Tom’s feelings for Angela again bubble to the surface and he realises he cannot ignore her final request.

Tom travels to Chicago for the funeral and then sets about his mission which hasn’t been made easy due to Angela’s decision to set him various tasks and riddles to find the information he needs. He soon discovers he has attracted the attention not only of Angela’s business associates but of a government covert counter-espionage agency. As he struggles to stay alive in order to track the money trail, he has to wade through of layers of deception and misdirection. The bodies start to mount up as he realises he’s nothing more than a pawn in a dangerous game.

The story is written in the first person from Tom’s perspective with his foils playing their parts in the third person. By making use of metaphors in potentially deadly situations and drawing on ironic black humour, there are overtones of Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe in Tom’s attitude to life.

I found there to be a lot of characters with minimal backstories and confess to getting intermittently confused as to who was who. In addition, we have few backdrop descriptions or scene-setting. Nevertheless, there is no doubt the plot is relentlessly fast-paced with some clever twists and readers will need to have their wits about them to keep up. The conclusion to the story is satisfying with an intriguing sting in the tail, along with the hint of another outing for Tom.

This isn’t a gentle read but equally, it isn’t all blood and gore. For the intricacies of the plot and the fact I enjoy a traditional-style thriller with some contemporary technology thrown in, I award five stars.

Resumed writing after forty odd years in foreign intelligence and international sales. Original wife, but after fifty years we are both out of warranty.

Have had a couple hundred short stories and poems published so far, and three books. A collection of my fairy and folk tales, “The Witch Made Me Do It” is published by Gypsy Shadow Press. A novella, “The Witches’ Bane,” is scheduled for republication in June of 2018, and my collected fantasy/horror stories, “Capricious Visions,” from Gnome on Pig Press. A chapbook of individually published poems is currently being shopped around.

Speak German, French and Japanese in that order of fluency. Lived in Germany, Japan and England, and visited over seventy countries. Dissipate my free time fly fishing and shooting.

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