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Title: Total Letdown!
Review: greatly anticipated this&#151;Hawes' sophomore effort after the excellent A White Merc With Fins&#151;and found it resoundingly unsatisfying. The plot follows an early-30ish married, successful Londoner as his fiddling with his company's books result in the attention of Inland Revenue. Suddenly desperate to pay off the authorities and maintain his standard of living, he is forced into bed (yes, literally and figuratively) with Russian mafia/bizness concern, all of which leads to some silly tie-in with oil pipelines and British and American intelligence. What is much more interesting than all this, however, is the internal musing on the nature and uses of sex in the the protagonists' life. While there are some good bits here and there, I found it to be a rather annoying book in the end. This may be partially a result of my raised expectations after loving A White Merc With Fins so much. His next book, Dead Long Enough, was a rather mixed effort.
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