This isn’t going to be much of a review, quite honestly because The Gray Man by Mark Greaney is absolute garbage.
I hate writing negative reviews about books (I have in the past on other platforms for clicks – but here I’m not fussed about that) because I appreciate how difficult it is to produce a novel, and that’s not even taking into account the incredible difficulty there is actually getting anything into print.
Every book (even the worst) has been loved by someone out there. The Gray Man is likely a book (a series, I believe) that has a lot of fans, but my days of reading ABC super-solider thriller books are mostly in the past.
Airport fiction, as they say, or in my case, stuck on a bus travelling across Ireland fiction. God knows why Audible thought to suggest Mark Greaney to me (I believe there’s a movie out there), but to be fair to the algorithm, I laughed out loud more times than I could count.
From page one, it felt like one of those American procedural programmes (CSI somewhere or another), as though a team of writers had sat in a room and decided to work in every spy/thriller clique in a single novel.
My favourite part of the whole experience was the chap doing the audio; his range of accents was impressive, so much so that I had no idea where on earth the characters were from. In particular, his imitation of the South African accent was spectacularly bad…
Obviously, I don’t know the narrator, but if the chap has ever actually met a South African… well, I’d be stunned (he was doing a kind of hybrid Northern-Irish / Welsh accent – it was wonderfully hilarious).
Anyway… I’ve rinsed the narrator enough; he was just reading the book and can’t be credited/condemned for its content.
The Gray Man just wasn’t the book for me; if you’re reading this and enjoy Matthew Reilly, Dan Brown, Kyle Mills, Gregg Hurwitz, Terry Hayes (and folks like that), this may be just the book for you.
BOOKS and GIGS and STUFF 