Fade (Mills)

Kyle Mills is usually an unorthodox writer. His books are usually thought-provoking– for example, Smoke Screen posed the question of what might happen if a major tobacco company said “to heck with it” and shut its doors. However, Fade is a straightforward action novel, and IMHO not a particularly good one. The main character is a former Navy SEAL who is forced to retire after being wounded. He’s bitter, understandably enough, because there’s a bullet lodged near his spine that will inevitably paralyze him, and the government refused to help him get surgery while the problem was still fixable. Now the Department of Homeland Security is trying to recruit Fade to come back, and he doesn’t want to. What follows is a pretty stock tale, uplifted by Mills’ gift for witty dialogue. In the second half of the book, the characters suddenly develop; that’s a weird way to put it, but it’s almost like seeing a flat 2-D drawing morph into a fully rendered 3-D representation. That’s not enough to save the book, though. The ending is predictable, and this just isn’t up to Mills’ usual standards.