Books like Death Run

Jack Higgins returns and that can only mean Sean Dillion is also here with yet another cookie cutter adventure. Hold the presses…. This is not a Dillon book, but ‘Death Run’, one of the short lived teen fiction novels that Higgins wrote in conjunction with Justin Richards. In book two, Rich and Jade Chance are together with their agent father John. They think they are on a holiday in Monaco, but for John it is more of a Busman’s Holiday when he is tasked with smuggling out an informant from under the eyes of the Mafia.‘Death Run’ is a fun book, full of moments rather than a cohesive whole. Like a Bond movie is spans the globe and takes on a series of mini adventures, whilst the overall story does not always work. In this case some of the elements are better than others. The stand out moment is a siege on a private school. This contains action and suspense, all within the confines of a school that a teenage reader can relate too. This part of the book also has some level of realism, although Rich and Jade are a little brighter and bolder than the average child, what they achieve in the school is believable.It is later in the book, when the stakes are made even higher that things fall apart a little. This being a book for the early teen market it has to soften the edges. However, the fact that Jade in particular is not finished off is a miracle. A book that starts of edgy and modern feeling eventually descends into some Enid Blyton levels of japery. The goodwill that a young reader was being talked to, rather than talked at, is lost with a final section that feels too patronising.The best book for teenagers are just great stories with no real pandering to the reader’s wellbeing. Higgins and Richards start off well with a great Venice based action sequence and then a school invasion, but the final section falls flat. There is still fun to be had in the book, but if the momentum was held to the end it could have rivalled some of Higgins best adult books, as it is, it feels more like one of the many Dillon novels that fans of the author have become accustomed to having to read.