By Tom Cain

The Viking Press, 322 pages, hardcover, $24.95

Reviewed By William McKeen, June 2008

Samuel Carver is a paid assassin who makes his work look easy and his hits look like accidents. For Carver, it’s an honorable vocation – fighting evil one bad guy at a time.

But then he gets hired to off a bad guy and it turns out he was double-crossed. He didn’t kill a bad guy in that Paris underpass; he took out Diana, Princes of Wales, one of the most loved people on the planet. The double- crosser who hired him planned to have him wiped out by other assassins, but Carver was too fast for his killers and so now he has to know: who set him up, and who would want Diana dead?

This is fiction, of course, but in the real world, people still fret over Diana’s death and wonder if the truth has been told. Part of the tease behind The Accident Man is that the author, Tom Cain, is identified as an investigative journalist, writing under a pen name. Is his speculation well-founded but just something he can’t prove in his day job as a reporter?

We don’t know. What we do know is that The Accident Man is as thrilling as any James Bond adventure. Carver, in fact, is so savvy and quick on his feet that we know Bond could never outwit this guy.

At first, Carver thinks he’s done what he was hired to do – offed some Middle-East baddie. But when two leathered-up thugs on motorcycles chase him into the Parisian sewers, he realizes he wasn’t supposed to survive the night. He captures one of these and when the leather is stripped off, it’s no thug; it’s a hot Russian assassin named Alix. Her job – with her fellow motorbike Muscovite – was to kill Carver. Carver convinces her that she also was doomed not to last the night, and they both set off to see who was the mastermind behind this madness. (It’s comforting to know that the collapse of the former Soviet Union has not denied us vigorous and vodka-swilling Russian villains.)

It’s not until the next day that Carver learns, through saturation news coverage, that the person he shot was Diana, the people’s princess and doer of many good deeds.

For a paid assassin, Carver is refreshingly moral. He never signed on to kill good people and so – without a friend in the world (literally) – he and Alix travel the Continent, one step ahead of those who want to kill them. However, life on the run still allows for vigorous intercourse and flashbacks to their equally miserable childhoods. As a young teenager, Alix was sold into slavery and prostitution, and Carver’s life wasn’t much better. Naturally, they fall in love and form a bond.

Or do they? There are enough twists and turns in the plot to make Donny Osmond into a paranoid schizophrenic.  You’ll get sweaty palms just reading it. The Accident Man is everything a great thriller is supposed to be – and then some.