Mr. Smoke

Smoke #1

by Preston Walker

Mr. Smoke By Robert Preston Walker Award Winning Novel, Mr. Smoke aptly Describes a Victim Turned Hero! This Exciting and Original New Novel by Robert Preston Walker weaves a Tale of How One Man Becomes a Terrorist Fighting Sensation! After decades living in fear, a newscast brings Damon Gray out of his shell and turns him into an international sensation in the crime-fighting world. Years earlier, he and his parents were victims of a terrorist bombing. His mother and father died, but he was revived at the scene. Before the accident he was a talented concert pianist with extraordinary psychic abilities, but such a traumatic event masked his gifts. Years later, after his grandparents die in a plane crash, he hits a new rock bottom - until seeing a news report about a terrorist act jolts his abilities and gives him the power to avenge his family. Damon quickly becomes a hero - a terrorist bomber assassin dubbed "Mr. Smoke" by one of his Irish terrorist bomber victims. As Mr. Smoke, Damon hunts down terrorists, another group is hunting him. Damon is an Enhanced Human (EH), and each of these gifted individuals has been hunted by the Enhanced Human Exterminators. One of Damon's would-be assassins offers a fun sub-plot, as she fails in her attempt to assassinate him and eventually joins the Smoke team as "Misty Smoke." In their adventures, the Smoke organization encounters beings from other dimensions that add an extra layer of intrigue to this compelling novel. Robert Walker 's riveting plot line is also propelled by a cast of characters that help Damon fulfill his mission. Two of his closest friends are American Sylvia Brighton and her husband Michael, head of the British Anti-Terrorist Control Unit and a Lord of the Realm. His assistant, Garret Hastings, an ex-military man, would lay down his life for Damon in a heartbeat. A truly delightful and action-packed novel that pits good against evil, Mr. Smoke has accumulated rave reviews from readers. It's a hero's story that weaves international, and inter-dimensional, action with one man's pursuit of justice.

436 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2008

Reviews

[Dave · Rating 1 out of 5]

I don't want to be cruel, but I want to save anyone the time or money lost reading this book. The premise was over-the-top and did not deliver. The main character is the nearly omnipotent spy Damon, who like several of the characters had several confusing, silly and needlessly confusing aliases or name changes throughout the book. The poor, two-dimensional terrorists never stood a chance, literally soiling themselves when Damon (Mr. Smoke, Smoke, Gray Ghost, Ghost Assassin, etc.) showed up in their bedrooms at night. It would have worked better if the bad guys were a threat. Mr. Smoke is loaded with psychic abilities, strange anatomy and extradimensional friends all revealed too late or haphazardly in the book for the reader to appreciate or to make sense as a story. The big showdowns with the baddies were dealt with summarily and very unsatisfactorily. The 'good' characters, Smoke's (Damon's) friends are beautiful jet-setters who are accomplished in the extreme but are rendered so poorly as to make the reader wonder how they ever held a job, much less ran a super-secret international spy agency. Much story is dedicated to trite banter about body parts, plastic surgery (real and supernatural) and eventual forays into porn. Porn?! Why? Imagine if your naughty eleven year old nephew tried to write a racy spy story for Penthouse and this is what you might get. Even the sex, as it is,lacks any fulfilling detail, much less justification. The characters are superficial mouthpieces to the author's creepy ideas about what is sexy and the female characters compliant Playboy bunnies. Annoyingly, the author does not understand punctuation or italics and it is clear no editor was involved. It is an amateurish book that in many places is unintentionally hilarious.