Skip to main content

Sins of the Assassin

Review

Sins of the Assassin

SINS
OF THE ASSASSIN is the second entry in Robert Ferrigno’s
Assassin Trilogy, which began so famously and brilliantly
with PRAYERS FOR THE ASSASSIN.

The novel is set in 2043, a few years after the conclusion of the
first book. I’m not quite sure how Ferrigno managed this
feat, but it’s not necessary to read PRAYERS FOR THE ASSASSIN
before digging into this one (though you’ll absolutely want
to). In this series, the author visualizes a United States of
America that has been ripped asunder. New York and Washington, D.C.
are nuclear wastelands. The Islamic Republic, uneasily ruled by
moderate Muslims, lies to the West; the Christian Bible Belt to the
South. Canada is set on encroachment to the North, while the Aztlan
Empire lays an increasingly emboldened claim to the Southwest. The
balance of power is uneasy and precarious; it is threatened to be
permanently upset when the president of the Islamic Republic learns
that Colonel Zachary Smitts, a rogue military officer in the Bible
Belt, is hunting for an ultimate weapon of unknown design that was
hidden beneath a mountain range in the closing days of the United
States.

Rakkim Epps, seemingly near death at the close of PRAYERS FOR THE
ASSASSIN, is assigned to execute a covert operation into the Bible
Belt to learn the worth of the weapon and then to steal it or
destroy it. Epps is accompanied by Leo, an emotionally inept
19-year-old going on 13, whose technologically enhanced brain is
inhibited only by his personality. Opposing Epps is Gravenholtz,
Smitts’s second in command, an artificially enhanced killer
whose ability to kill is exceeded only by his enjoyment of the
task. There is also Baby, Smitts’s wife and a temptress
without peer.

Even as Epps carries out his mission, struggling against his
grudging admiration for the Colonel, radical Islamics are planning
their own mission against the moderate president of the Islamic
Republic --- a mission that they feel is divinely ordained and
inspired but is financed and led by the Old One, a deadly enemy
possessed of a limitless intellect and endless wealth. From the
lawless backwoods of Virginia where a snake-handling militia
prepares for the end of days to the streets of Seattle, where
black-robed Islamic extremists mete out a rough and immediate
corporal punishment with impunity, Epps faces danger and death at
every turn.

SINS OF THE ASSASSIN contains violence, unrelenting and
uncompromising, unbridled erotica (I’m still waiting for my
eyeballs to come completely unsteamed) and memorable characters you
will never forget. Most significantly, however, it is set in a
world in which Ferrigno has seemingly accounted for every element,
every nuance; a world that is so different from yet so very close
to our own, simply without the official and acknowledged
boundaries. Frightening, exhilarating and eminently readable from
beginning to end, this is a book for all seasons.

Reviewed by Joe Hartlaub on January 23, 2011

Sins of the Assassin
by Robert Ferrigno

  • Publication Date: February 5, 2008
  • Genres: Fiction, Thriller
  • Hardcover: 400 pages
  • Publisher: Scribner
  • ISBN-10: 1416537651
  • ISBN-13: 9781416537656