Mr. Smoke

Smoke #1

by Preston Walker

Damon Gray, a gifted young concert pianist with tremendous gifts and abilities, at the age of fourteen, loses his parents to a terrorist bomber. He dies when they do. He is brought back to life by paramedics. He awakens to find that he has lost not only his parents, but all of his psychic abilities as well. He becomes colorblind. He is crippled in a way that most people couldnt understand. He retreats from life. His grandparents help him as best they can. He starts touring again. His fans welcome him back, but the magic in his music is gone for him. He allows no photographs to be taken of him. He is called the Gray Ghost by a photographer that had tried in vain to take a photo of him. Fourteen years later, Damon loses his grandparents in a plane crash. He retreats further. Damon feels that there is a conspiracy to kill off his whole family. He is now the last of his line. In his mid thirties, he sees a television newscast about a terrorist bombing. Something happens inside of him that gives him back all of his psychic abilities and more. He knows who planted the bomb, and where the terrorist bomber is at every moment. Payback time And this is just the beginning Walk through this world (and others) with Damon and see it through his eyes. A journey of discovery, of friendship and of choices...

438 pages, Kindle Edition

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.