Barry Eisler Books In Order

Rain Fall/A Clean Kill in Tokyo

Enthusiastic publishers around the world have become enthralled by John Rain, a strikingly fresh new thriller hero destined to be one of the most talked about of the season. Born of an American mother and a Japanese father, Rain is a businessman based in Tokyo, living a life of meticulously planned anonymity. There are few who know who he is or what he does. Trained by the U.S. Special Forces and a veteran of Vietnam, he is a cool, self contained loner and he has built a steady business over the past twenty five years specializing in death by ‘natural causes.’ After the assassination of a government official in a crowded subway car, Rain’s carefully ordered world comes under siege. Agents within and without the international intelligence communities have been circling him for some time and, having connected him to the subway incident, may now have the scent they have been seeking. At the same time, Rain is drawn outside his private world by an alluring jazz pianist, the dead man’s daughter, who is the key to the very secrets her father was trying to reveal when he died.

Hard Rain / Blood from Blood / A Lonely Resurrection

John Rain half Japanese, half American, raised in both countries but at home in neither is trying to leave his life as a freelance assassin. After killing a CIA officer who hunted him halfway around the globe, Rain goes underground, hoping to find the peace that has eluded him. But then Tatsu, his old nemesis from the Japanese FBI, comes to him with one last job: to find and eliminate a killer at large, a creature with neither compassion nor compunction, whose activities could tip the balance of power in Japan’s corrupt politics and who seems to have designs on Rain’s few friends. To protect them, Rain will have to pursue his most dangerous quarry yet through the crosshairs of the CIA and the Japanese mafia, where the differences between friend and foe and truth and deceit are as murky as the rain slicked streets of Tokyo. /Content /EditorialReview EditorialReview Source Amazon. com Review /Source Content Barry Eisler’s half breed freelance assassin John Rain returns to Tokyo for a second outing in Hard Rain, the sequel to Eisler’s stunning 2002 debut, Rain Fall. Once again Rain is working with, or at least parallel to, Tatsu, a wily veteran of Japan’s FBI equivalent, who aims to cleanse the Japanese government of its systemic corruption. To further this goal, he’s persuaded the ever cautious Rain to take out Murakami, a brutal gangster and hitman who specializes in making his killings look like suicide, a specialty Rain thought was his alone. Liquidating the dangerous and elusive Murakami proves to be a difficult task, however, one that leads to personal loss for Rain, and sets the plot on course for a climax that hits with the power of a well delivered roundhouse kick.

Eisler builds on Rain’s self enforced isolation and loneliness as he expertly shows the reader Tokyo as channeled by Chandler, transforming the burgeoning metropolis into a noir catacomb of dimly lit hostess bars, scheming bureaucrats, shadowy intelligence agents, and outlaw martial arts dojos where thugged up yakuza train for illicit death matches.

While the plot becomes complicated toward the novel’s conclusion, Rain is a refreshing and complex character whom readers will want to see return for another installment. If you’ve a yen for a thriller that mixes suspense, intrigue, and action with a Japanese flavor and a hardboiled American attitude, Eisler’s Hard Rain is an excellent choice. Benjamin Reese

Rain Storm

Critics praised Barry Eisler’s first two novels, Rain Fall and Hard Rain, calling Japanese American John Rain, the cynical, romantic, conscientious assassin, ‘one of the most memorable characters in recent thrillers’ San Jose Mercury News and ‘a remarkable creation, a multifaceted killer with the soul of a poet’ Mystery Ink. In Rain Storm, Rain has fled to Brazil to escape the killing business and the enemies who have been encircling him. But his knack for making death seem to have been of ‘natural causes’ and his ability to operate unnoticed in Asia continue to create unwelcome demand for his services. His old employer, the CIA, persuades him to take on a high risk assignment: a ruthless arms dealer supplying criminal groups throughout Southeast Asia. The upside? Financial, of course, along with the continued chimera of moral redemption. But first, Rain must survive the downside: a second assassin homing in on the target; the target’s consort an alluring woman named Delilah with an agenda of her own; and the possibility that the entire mission is nothing but an elaborate setup. From the gorgeous beaches of Rio to the glitzy casinos of Macao to the gritty back streets of Hong Kong and Kowloon, Rain becomes a reluctant player in an international game far deadlier and more insidious than he has ever encountered before.

Killing Rain / One Last Kill / Redemption Games

No one but Japanese American assassin John Rain can win the game of cross and double cross he encounters in this new novel of sexy international intrigue in the series. Torn between his past as a soldier and his vocation as a killer, longing for attachment but forced to operate alone, and haunted by the fear that one day there must be a reckoning for the things he has done, John Rain moves like a dark ghost through Tokyo and the other urban landscapes in which his Asian features enable him to operate undetected. His ability to make death appear to have been of ‘natural causes’ keeps his reluctant services in constant demand. In Killing Rain, Rain has a new employer, the Mossad which needs an operator who can remove ‘problems’ in Asia and a new partner: Dox, the ex marine sniper and party animal first introduced in Rain Storm. He also has a new hope that by using his fearsome talents in the service of something good, he might atone for all the lives he has already taken. But when Rain’s freshly awakened conscience causes him to botch an assignment, turning what should have been a surgical hit into a massacre, he finds himself running both from the Mossad and from the CIA. Can he trust Delilah, the alluring Israeli agent whom he once fought and then loved, to save him now?

The Last Assassin / Extremis

When John Rain, the Japanese/American ‘contract killer with a conscience’ Entertainment Weekly, learns that his former lover, Midori, has been raising their child in New York, he senses a chance for reconciliation, perhaps even for redemption. But Midori is being watched by Rain’s enemies, and his sudden appearance puts mother and child in terrible danger. To save them, Rain is forced to use the same deadly talents he had been hoping to leave behind. With the help of Tatsu, his friendly nemesis in the Japanese FBI, and Dox, the ex marine sniper whose good ol boy persona masks a killer as deadly as Rain himself, Rain races against time to bring his enemies into the open and eliminate them forever. But to finish the job, he ll need one more ally: Israeli intelligence agent Delilah, a woman who represents an altogether different kind of threat…
Filled with ‘action packed scenes worthy of a Jerry Bruckheimer film’ Sun Sentinel, The Last Assassin is Barry Eisler s most ambitious and most satisfying book yet.

Requiem For an Assassin / The Killer Ascendant

If you had to kill three people to save your best friend’s life, would you do it? When John Rain decides to get out of the business, his hand is forced by rogue CIA operative Jim Hilger. Hilger kidnaps Dox, Rain’s trusted partner and closest friend, and offers Rain a choice: carry out a final assignment, or bear the responsibility for Dox’s murder. For a professional like John Rain, the choice ought to be easy: Do the job a series of three hits then walk away. But how does Rain know Jim Hilger won’t kill Dox anyway, once the assignment is complete? How does he know that each of the hits isn’t simultaneously a setup for Rain himself? And what will he do when he finds out that among the targets of this lethal game of extortion is someone else Rain cares about deeply? From the urban canyons of Silicon Valley and New York to the lush forests of Bali, the boulevards of Paris, and the old killing fields of Vietnam, Rain must grapple with his age, his enemies, and most of all, his conscience in a battle that not even Rain ‘the stuff great characters are made of’ Entertainment Weekly can hope to survive intact.

The Detachment

John Rain is back. And the most charismatic assassin since James Bond San Francisco Chronicle is up against his most formidable enemy yet: the nexus of political, military, media, and corporate factions known only as the Oligarchy. When legendary black ops veteran Colonel Scott Hort Horton tracks Rain down in Tokyo, Rain can t resist the offer: a multi million dollar payday for the natural causes demise of three ultra high profile targets who are dangerously close to launching a coup in America. But the opposition on this job is going to be too much for even Rain to pull it off alone. He ll need a detachment of other deniable irregulars: his partner, the former Marine sniper, Dox. Ben Treven, a covert operator with ambivalent motives and conflicted loyalties. And Larison, a man with a hair trigger and a secret he ll kill to protect. From the shadowy backstreets of Tokyo and Vienna, to the deceptive glitz and glamour of Los Angeles and Las Vegas, and finally to a Washington, D.C. in a permanent state of war, these four lone wolf killers will have to survive presidential hit teams, secret CIA prisons, and a national security state as obsessed with guarding its own secrets as it is with invading the privacy of the populace. But first, they ll have to survive each other. The Detachment is what fans of Eisler, one of the most talented and literary writers in the thriller genre Chicago Sun Times, have been waiting for: the worlds of the award winning Rain series, and of the bestselling Fault Line and Inside Out, colliding in one explosive thriller as real as today’s headlines and as frightening as tomorrow s.

Fault Line

Silicon Valley: the eccentric inventor of a new encryption application is murdered in an apparent drug deal. Istanbul: a cynical undercover operative receives a frantic call from his estranged brother, a patent lawyer who believes he ll be the next victim. And on the sun drenched slopes of Sand Hill Road, California’s nerve center of money and technology, old family hurts sting anew as two brothers who share nothing but blood and bitterness wage a desperate battle against a faceless enemy. Alex Treven has sacrificed everything to achieve his sole ambition: making partner in his high tech law firm. But then the inventor of a technology Alex is banking on is murdered, the patent examiner who reviewed the innovation dies and Alex himself narrowly escapes an attack in his own home. Off balance, out of ideas, and running out of time, he knows that the one person who can help him is the last person he d ever ask: his brother. Ben Treven is a military liaison element, an elite undercover soldier paid to find, fix, and finish high value targets in the United States global war on terror. Disenchanted with what he sees as America s culture of denial and decadence, Ben lives his detached life in the shadows because the black ops world is all he really knows and because other than Alex, whom he hasn t spoken to since their mother died, his family is long gone. But blood is thicker than water, and when Ben receives Alex s frantic call he hurries to San Francisco to help him. Only then does Alex reveal that there s another player who knows of the technology: Sarah Hosseini, a young Iranian American lawyer whom Alex has long secretly desired and whom Ben immediately distrusts. As these three struggle to identify the forces attempting to silence them, Ben and Alex are forced to examine the events that drove them apart even as Sarah s presence, and her own secret yearnings, deepens the Fault Line between them.A full throttle thriller that is both emotionally and politically charged, Fault Line centers on a conspiracy that has spun out of the shadows and onto the streets of America, a conspiracy that can be stopped by only three people three people with different worldviews, different grievances, different motives. To survive the forces arrayed against them, they ll first have to survive one another. From the Hardcover edition.

Inside Out

Torture. Ghost detainees. And a massive cover up that continues even today. This is the propulsive thriller that only former CIA operative turned bestselling novelist Barry Eisler could write. Marooned in a Manila jail after a bar fight fatality, black ops soldier Ben Treven gets a visit from his former commander, Colonel Scott Horton, who explains the price of Ben’s release: Find and eliminate Daniel Larison, a rogue operator from Ben s unit who has stolen ninety two torture tapes from the CIA and is using them to blackmail the U.S. government. But other players are after the tapes, too, and to find Larison, Ben will have to survive CIA hit teams, Blackwater mercenaries, and the long reach of the White House. He ll also have to find a way to handle Paula Lanier, a smart, sexy FBI agent who has her own reasons for wanting the tapes and is determined to get them before Ben does. With the stakes this high, everyone has an angle everyone but Ben, who will have to find the right alliance if he wants to stay alive. From the Hardcover edition.