Mercy River by Glen Erik Hamilton

William Morrow, 368 pages, $26.99

Glen Erik Hamilton has turned the life of Van Shaw, ex-Army Ranger and ex-thief, into a series. I liked the first book, never got around to the next two, but picked up Shaw’s story in “Mercy River,” Van Shaw’s fourth adventure.

As one would expect about a story of a former elite special ops guy, there is a lot of action. But there’s also a lot of moving back and forth and missed opportunities. The missed opportunities are because Van believes that killing should be a last, last, last resort. So the action could have ended by chapter seven (just exaggerating here) if Van had shot the bad guy. There was a lot of driving from Seattle (where Van lives) to a fictional central Oregon town to Portland to central Oregon to Seattle to… Anyhow, a lot of driving, some of which was accomplished with a life-threatening injury. Yee ha!

I make fun of it here, but I like Van. He’s got troubles and PTSD and a desire to get over himself. He has his standards, and those standards dictated that he wanted out of the thriving heist operation his grandfather, who raised him, had going with his heist buddies. Van has skills developed as a teenage accomplice to his grandfather. But the military squeezed most of that out of him, and he returned to a dying grandfather in the first book, “Past Crimes.”

In “Mercy River,” Van winds his way to the town of Mercy River in central Oregon to answer a distress call from a Ranger buddy, Leo Pak. In less time than it takes to blow his nose, Van hoists himself into his decaying Dodge pickup and zooms off to play cavalry to the rescue.

Van finds a battered Leo in a jail cell in Mercy River. Leo’s PTSD makes being in small spaces very uncomfortable. Plus, there’s a potential concussion that has not been medically treated. And Leo is being charged with murder. Leo? It makes getting Leo out of jail imperative.

The man murdered was Leo’s new employer. A) What was Leo doing in Mercy River? He lives in Utah and has no perceivable reason to be in Mercy River. B) Who killed crotchety old Erle, the local gunstore owner, if Leo didn’t do it? C) There are coincidentally a lot of Rangers in town, swelling the population to twice its normal size, for some sort of alpha male Ranger festival. Maybe one of them did it? Is that why Leo was in town? Leo makes like Marcel Marceau, only without the gestures.

Van has a lot of work ahead of him, and he needs help. He calls his grandfather’s irascible attorney, Ephraim Ganz, out of his warm bed in Seattle to travel to Mercy River to get Leo out. It should be easy-peasy, but then Leo pleads guilty. Van spends quite a few pages unraveling what that is about, then the rest of the book is about a heist-heist, or heisting a heist. (I love heist books. As soon as I take my fingers off the keyboard, I’ll be rubbing my hands together and cackling.) I wish more of the book had been about the heist-heist and less about white supremacists and Ranger buddies.

There are very few in-depth characters of the legally law-enforcing persuasion in this book. There’s a lot about Ranger code, right vs. right-but-not-legal, kill vs. just kill a little. That’s fine. It’s fiction.

Overall, I enjoyed it. I liked most of the Ranger one-upsmanship. I really liked the heist. Maybe I already told you that. And I sympathize with Glen Erik Hamilton's desire to raise the issue of the inadequate treatment many veterans receive for physical and psychological issues.