Friday, January 02, 2015

Queen and Country, Volume 4; Operation Blackwall by Greg Rucka, Jason Alexander (Artist)

Queen and Country, Vol. 4: Operation BlackwallQueen and Country, Vol. 4: Operation Blackwall by Greg Rucka
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This case hits to close to home for Tara Chase, Minder 2 for the British Special Service. Her school friend has been involved in a sex scandal, a sex video being used to blackmail her father into caving and backing out of a multimillion dollar communcations business deal by a player in the French government. One of her bosses sends her to France to investigate and to intervene in any way possible. In the meantime, her affair with a coworker is starting to get too serious, and Tara knows she's going to have to pull the plug.

This was good stuff. While the art is all black and white, it's beautifully done. The use of lines and shadows show talent that doesn't require coloring to dress it up (although I'm all for full-color artwork when it's there).

The narrative is tense and suspenseful, even though the dialogue is very economical. Tara is a complex woman. Not exactly personable, but she shows a lot of integrity and grit. I like that about her.

This is the first graphic novel I have read on my Kindle Fire, and I was pretty impressed at how easy it was to read and how good it looks. I'm kind of a cheapo, so I'm not saying I'm going to buy a lot of graphic novels in ebook format, but I will consider it more seriously now that I know I like the way they look on my ereader.

Queen and Country is spy fiction, and it works very well in the graphic novel format with the excellent artwork and good writing by Rucka. I paid $3.99 for the Kindle version, and I was pretty satisfied with the purchase.

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