Barry Eisler

The friendly folks at Amazon who surely have nothing but my best interests at heart made a personal recommendation to me that I might enjoy the books of one Barry Eisler, so I took their advice. And I hereby report that I do, indeed, enjoy his books! I just finished the series featuring the character of John Rain, a Japanese-American mercenary assassin, and I enjoyed it enough to want to continue with his subsequent works and I'm well into the first of those, a novel called "Fault Line". What's amusing about it so far are the hints he drops suggesting his own personal political ideology which seems to slant pretty heavily, um, left. There was some suggestion of this in the Rain series also, but in this novel it seems to be a little more pronounced. For example, a leading female character is an Iranian American young woman who becomes interested in politics and finds that she prefers reading blogs much more than "mainstream media" which is "too affiliated with corporate interests" (or something like that - I don't have the book with me to quote it word for word). Then there was this rib-tickler: She goes to college where she meets her first boyfriend to whom she loses her virginity and his name is - wait for it....Josh Marshall! Heh. To top that off, her next boyfriend is John Cole! I notice that Cole's blog has Eisler's latest book prominently advertised, but that doesn't necessarily indicate endorsement. However, to further support my theory that Mr. Eisler's fiction supports a leftist perspective, I saw the other day that Juan Cole over at Informed Comment had this blog post which is a pretty good recommendation also. I'm about to go to lunch and do some more reading!

UPDATE: Oh for Pete's sake, two seconds into my lunch time reading I come to this:

A moment later, another woman's voice came on, throatier than the first, the tone more businesslike. "Hello, this is Director Jane Hamsher, Computer Architecture, Software, and Information Security. May I ask to whom I'm speaking?"

LOL! This is great fun. Also - I completely forgot to mention (this makes me feel dumb): I didn't get the reference until all these other blog names came up, but the first character in the book is a guy who gets murdered, and his name is Hilzoy! Yes, Virginia, there is a definite trend here....