Panic by Jeff Abbott – book review
I’ll confess something, for a while I got sick of thrillers. Slowly discovering plot detail from impossibly dangerous situation to impossibly dangerous situation whilst enduring the odd quiet bit just got… old. Perhaps absence makes the heart grow fonder however, because I really enjoyed Panic.
Panic is about a man who receives a phone call from his mother, she’s nervous, she wants him to come home now. When he gets there he finds her dead body before being attacked himself by her murderers.
Initially he is just fighting for survival, but in order to save himself and those he loves he is forced to immerse himself in a murky world of subterfuge and espionage he never knew existed.
To use a cliché, Panic is a page turner. It achieves this by avoiding the dead spots that so many thrillers suffer from as a necessity to fill in the plot. Most of the revelations in the book are breathless because there is always the impression that the adversary could be right round the next corner even when the main characters are doing research in a library. The modern high tech world of surveillance and data trails is well used to make this feeling possible. Little is portrayed that is not relevant.
Violence is appropriate to the theme but is never dwelt on unnecessarily, whilst one could argue that more graphic scenes would not be out of place drawing such things out more than they are would impede the pace and simply turn some readers off. Equally the characters are developed as far as they need to be for empathy and the plot and no further.
If Panic has one flaw, it is simply the one that can be attributed to most violent thrillers, that the usual suspended disbelief is required in the continued survival of the protagonist. However because the protagonist is an intelligent adaptable person (along with the assistance he receives from various characters) who you genuinely feel sympathy for the action is rarely pushed into the unbelievable. Considering at one point he is swimming through an alligator enclosure, this is fairly high praise for the author.
The plot unfolds in a pleasing manner and I never found myself skim reading to get to the next “important” bit. There aren’t many big shocks but that’s more because you’re too busy moving along with the story than stopping to analyse the impact of a particular scene.
In short, If you like thrillers, you’ll like panic.
If you’ve grown a bit tired of the thriller formula I’d still advise you to give it a go. It might pleasantly surprise you.
For those who don’t read much I’ll say this book is somewhat like a good series of 24 without the annoying whining, trouble prone daughter. Give it a go 
