So I continue my reading of Chuck Dixon‘s Levon Cade series with the next two in the series: Levon’s Time and Levon’s Home, which are the seventh and eighth novels.
I’ll continue to post two novels at a time, and the series is up to 12 total. Also, it’s being developed into a TV series. We’ll see if it happens and if it’s any good.
Again Chuck Dixon is a long-time comicbook writer who has worked on a variety of characters at several publishers. I’ve read his stuff on Eclipse Comics’ Airboy series, but he has worked on The Punisher, Batman, and other characters and titles. He did an excellent comic adaption of J.R.R. Tolkien‘s The Hobbit, which I enjoyed. Most recently is the graphic novel Alphacore.
Levon Cade is a former Marine who was involved in black ops. Some have compared it with the Jack Reacher series, but there are differences. Reacher was an MP, but Cade was a black ops soldier.
In the first novel, he got into matters that forced him to go on the run with his young daughter, his wife being dead. But in subsequent novels, he has had to deal with various bad guys, and these are usually pretty bad people. Most importantly in the second one, he has the key to possibly billions in stolen money, which both the FBI and Treasury want, and they are hot to find him. But he is always one step ahead of them. And it seems some information on him is not available. Someone is protecting him.
In Levon’s Time, we get two storylines going. In the last novel, Cade was in the Middle East, helping someone to repay a debt. But at the end of that novel he was still there. So one storyline will be about Cade working on getting back home safely, but things go awry when he gets into Turkey. This lands him in a Turkish prison. He may need to make a “deal with the devil” to get out. How far will he go to get out?
Meanwhile, his daughter Merry is back home in Alabama and gets involved with a serious matter. She rescues a girl who has been trafficked and used to steal from stores. And those who “own” her want her back. Can she deal with this? In some ways, we can say she can take care of herself.
And I suspect we’ve seen the last of the FBI and Treasury agents, Bill Marquez and Nancy Valdez, as it seems that plotline is closed out. We also learn about Cade’s “origin,” so to speak.
Then we have Levon’s Home, which follows. A cousin comes to Levon for help. His young son has disappeared, and he asks Levon to look into it. While Levon is not a detective, he will help family. As he starts asking around, he finds there is more to it than he realizes. There have been several other young boys who have disappeared in the area. And they seem to be connected. It all comes to a bloody conclusion.
It looks like the next two novels will continue, at some level, the child trafficking theme of this last one. I plan on getting into them at some point. If you’re looking for some good action stories, even with some disturbing matters, this is a series to check out.
