Mark Rubinstein | Mark Rubinstein Blog

I’ve read all the John Rain thrillers over the last few years. They are extremely engrossing. The details of Tokyo and Japanese culture are incredible. Eisler paints pictures of the city and other locales (Europe and the United States) in such a colorful way, it makes you feel you’re actually there.His descriptions of John Rain’s precautionary methods, his shadowy lifestyle, and how Rain carries out his killing assignments are chilling, ingenious, and believable. His relationships with CIA rogues, renegades, and other assassins are drawn with skill and complexity.

Even more complicated are John Rain’s relationships with his lover Midori and with his Mossad agent-lover, Delilah.

In these novels, Eisler got me to experience something I wasn’t certain could happen: I cared deeply about a paid assassin who is a loner and a man without a country and seemingly without a conscience.

I recently read The Detachment, the latest John Rain novel, and Eisler managed to keep up the same level of tension and suspense as in the previous stories.

— Mark Rubinstein, author, Mad Dog House (October 2012)
The Detachment

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I’ve always loved westerns, from “Shane” to “True Grit.” You know, the whole elemental thing about the Old West, about character, guts, exploration and true-to-life cynicism about people and their greed, motives and predilictions.

In “The Sisters Brothers” Patrick deWitt takes us in a whole new direction. He merges literary style with good old fashioned western elements of violence and frontier sensibility.

Charlie and Eli Sisters are gunslinger brothers hired by The Commodore to find and kill a thief. Narrated by Eli, the story takes unexpected twists and avoids most of the western cliches. Told beautifully, the novel finds its own niche as a gritty yet literary story that should sit right up there in the pantheon of great westerns. It’s funny, sad, realistic and a joy to read. Atmospheric of the 1850s, The Sisters Brothers is as relevent to our times today as any contemporary novel.

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