[share_ebook] Hosts: Repairman Jack Novels

Wilson's latest Repairman Jack thriller (after All the Rage) shows the long-running series still creatively malleable and full of surprises. Each begins with the identity of the latest person to seek the urban mercenary's unorthodox skills: his beloved sister Kate, who's unaware at first it's her younger brother's job to "fix" problems and injustices that fall outside the usual legal boundaries. Kate asks Jack to investigate an apparent cult that her lover, Jeannette, has fallen in with while recovering from experimental viral treatment for a brain tumor, and Jack finds that the virus, tainted with a contaminant that has made it sentient, is organizing infected human hosts into "the Unity," a hive consciousness single-mindedly devoted to spreading itself throughout the world.

Jack is back, for 2002. F. Paul Wilson's engaging, self-employed, off-the-books fixer, Repairman Jack, returns for another intense, action-packed adventure just a little over the border into the weird, in The Haunted Air. First introduced years ago in the bestseller The Tomb, Jack has been the hero of a series of exciting novels set in and around New York City including Legacies, Conspiracies, All the Rage, and Hosts. "Repairman Jack is a wonderful character, ultracompetent but still vulnerable.

Rage, terror, and redemption: these are the stones upon which F. Paul Wilson builds the concluding chapter of Repairman Jack: The Early Years, the prequel trilogy focusing on the formative years of Wilson's globally popular supernatural troubleshooter. The strands of Jack's life, established in the first two books, Cold City and Dark City, are now woven into a complete pattern.

In F. Paul Wilson's 8th Repairman Jack novel, CRISSCROSS, Jack is back in New York and working on two unrelated fix-its. The first involves a nun being blackmailed by someone who has photos of her that she does not want made public. Who or what is in those photos, she won't say, but with her meager savings just about exhausted, she hires Jack to help her.

Reading a Repairman Jack novel seems, at times, a guilty pleasure; it's astonishingly easy to inhale the pages, like eating potato chips. A firm-jawed Mr. Fixit hero with a cryptic past–crunch! Crimes that go beyond (way, waaay beyond) the norms of traditional law–smack! A liberal sprinkling of screwball comedy and nasty supernatural beings–now that's tasty! Good, crispy fun, indeed. But F. Paul Wilson's tight plotting and appealing characters manage to elevate potato chips to the realm of haute cuisine (or at least a satisfyingly solid meal), and his latest, All the Rage, is no exception.

Urban mercenary Repairman Jack is back after a long hiatus, but Wilson's work-for-hire outlaw has clearly lost his edge since his last novel-length adventure, The Tomb (1984). Although still a lean and mean equalizer who makes his living "fixing" personal injustices, he has developed a soft spot for the kind of sympathetic victim that no conscientious defender could refuse. This new escapade pairs him with Alicia Clayton, head of a pediatric AIDS clinic in Manhattan, who has inherited a valuable Murray Hill townhouse from her estranged father.

Urban mercenary Repairman Jack is back after a long hiatus, but Wilson's work-for-hire outlaw has clearly lost his edge since his last novel-length adventure, The Tomb (1984). Although still a lean and mean equalizer who makes his living "fixing" personal injustices, he has developed a soft spot for the kind of sympathetic victim that no conscientious defender could refuse. This new escapade pairs him with Alicia Clayton, head of a pediatric AIDS clinic in Manhattan, who has inherited a valuable Murray Hill townhouse from her estranged father.

Urban mercenary Repairman Jack is back after a long hiatus, but Wilson's work-for-hire outlaw has clearly lost his edge since his last novel-length adventure, The Tomb (1984). Although still a lean and mean equalizer who makes his living "fixing" personal injustices, he has developed a soft spot for the kind of sympathetic victim that no conscientious defender could refuse. This new escapade pairs him with Alicia Clayton, head of a pediatric AIDS clinic in Manhattan, who has inherited a valuable Murray Hill townhouse from her estranged father.

In Wilson's well-wrought ninth Repairman Jack novel (after 2004's Crisscross), the off-the-books fix-it man, urban vigilante and paranormal adventurer reconnects with his estranged brother, Tom, after their father is gunned down in a terrorist attack at La Guardia Airport.