By Brad Parks
© 2021, Thomas & Mercer
ASIN: B08BZJ6VJ5
Kindle Version, file size 2873 KB
I have yet to read a Brad Parks novel that doesn’t grab me. This one was no exception. Parks knows how to write great thrillers, and delights in doing so. Unthinkable is a twist on the old trolley problem—basically, if you could save five people by killing one person, could you/would you do it? That philosophical/ethical debate is interesting enough. But Parks twists it like a knife in main character Nate’s heart when he is confronted with a more up-close and personal version of the dilemma.
Parks’ characters have depth. They aren’t just names and faces, they have motivating factors that drive them; they want, need, dream, squabble, love, and hate, all the things that bring them alive on the page. It is impossible for me to stay aloof from their quandaries; thus I am swept along with their narrative.
This impossible, unthinkable choice Nate has to make, though…wow. I honestly didn’t know which way he would go. I couldn’t help but try and put myself in his shoes. Could I do what was being asked of me? Of course not. It’s unthinkable. Yet Parks keeps tightening the screws, pushing the plot into a bottleneck so that there is no clear way around the inevitable. And even when I thought it was obvious what would happen next, Parks yanks the story in a totally new direction with twists I did not see coming. I was already hooked before I’d gotten ten percent of the way through the novel, but by thirty percent, I could not put it down. I finished the whole book in two days.
Unthinkable is a class act, a thriller that lives up to its name with every page. Most highly recommended.