This book fails to live up to the gun-porn action suggested by the two balaclava-clad machine-gun-toting troopers on the yellow-on-red book cover. As one might guess from the cover, a hostage is taken, and violence ensues. I won’t go into the “plot” because this book is over three years old (2006); “plot” summaries can be easily found elsewhere on the web.

The viewer of this cover might reasonably expect to read lots of text like, oh I don’t know,

The three 9mm rounds fired in rapid succession lifted his body upwards and backwards into the wall; he fell and settled, sitting, like a life-sized Kevlar-wearing rag doll.

(Yes, I wrote that myself, on the spot.)

The failed promise is that out of 750 pages, the reader (me, with the protagonist) encounters only three pages’ worth of shots fired in anger, none fired by the protagonist, and none fired at the protagonist.

My (other) gripes about this book:

• The Hostage, at 750 pages, is too inconveniently unwieldy to carry in my commuter bag for my ride to work.
• The garish primary yellow-on-red color scheme draws attention to me. But let’s just say that the ladies don’t walk up to me asking what I’m reading.

After finally completing this book, I did some research and found that Griffin’s style is to highlight the behind-the-scenes bureaucratic and logistical gymnastics that must precede the expected Kevlar-wearing-rag-doll-yielding operations. Instead of gun-porn, we get pages and pages of West Wing-style dialogue and bureaucratic shenanigans, which people apparently pay good money to read.