GROUP READ: Iron House (SPOILERS, BEWARE!)

Here's a SPOILER thread for John Hart's Iron House, discuss freely!

Wow, I've read the first fourteen chapters and I am liking what I am reading. Lots of excitement, lots of secrets, bodies piling up, all the right ingredients for a good thriller!

Finished. Loved it. More comments later.

I finished it last night and thought that it was excellent. It's a little early in the year for favorite of the year, but I'm thinking Iron House could be a strong contender.

More comments later as others finish.

Finished it tonight. Had some surprises in it I didn't see coming!

I finished it tonight as well. I really enjoyed this book, even though I had to suspend my disbelief a little, overall I was glued to the pages right up to the end.

I finished it today. I think it was well written and interesting--it kept me engaged, though I agree with DeltaQueen50: I had to suspend disbelief.

I think that with most "full-throttle" thrillers the reader has to let go and let the story carry him along.

This thread is for spoilers - right?

So, SPOILER:

I loved the resolution of this book. I was expecting that the Senator's wife would be the mother, so was surprised that she wasn't. I also like the way Michael confronted his mother and was able to walk away - she obviously deserves nothing from the three of them, ending up alone and sick is her punishment.

Hmm, well, I really liked the way Hart led me to believe he'd be following the standard rules of thriller writing (helpless female romantic interest, etc...) and played around with them. I liked that Michael didn't magically know Elena had been taken.

But, yeah, that last little twist about Abigail took some of the enjoyment away. It was just a bit much. And I question why Abigail, who murdered people while mentally incapacitated, deserved a happy ending while Arabella did not--after all she suffered the same mental illness and her body count was lower. And between her and Caravel, I think I had enough of evil mothers!

All in all, though, a fun ride and a welcome quick read as I work my way through Moby Dick.

@9I kind of agree about the body count. The plot/ending of the story was rather awry of my moral compass. The story was also a tad violent for my tastes—and the worst of the violence was targeted at women and children. I also thought the whole dissociative personality disorder as an excuse for murder (and as a “plot twist”) was a bit cliché. However, I accepted all these little quirks of the story since it was well written and kept me interested. Despite their flaws, I cared enough about the characters to hope they had a happy ending.

I didn't like the bit about Abagail killing the old bullies - I guess I wanted Jessup to be the guilty one there, or even Julian. And I agree - I thought it was unfair that everyone else in that wretched family could be excused their actions because of their mental illness combined with a bad environment, except Arabella. We never got any inkling of what SHE endured as a child, but I'll bet it was similarly horrible.

One thing that puzzled me - and maybe I'm just a little dense - but what was the list that Michael found in Stevan's room at the hide-out? It seemed to make everything clear for him, and he returned it for the police to find, but I never got just what it was.

Another thing that I thought I was missing was about the senator. He was obviously corrupt, but was there more than that? Was he involved in the rest of the story at some level? Maybe with Otto Katilin?

Not a flawless story, but definitely good enough that I was happy to excuse its unrealistic moments. It had everything I expect in a thriller - fast pace, intrigue, danger, deception, and a little bit of romance.

I finally finished it today. I really liked most of it, I listened to an audiobook and felt the ending dragged on and on. I didn't need to have all the details of Abigail, Julian, Jessup and Michael working their relationships with each other out. I liked the idea of the end of Iron House but it didn't seem necessary to add the extra chapter in where they went there and did it. The final bit in Spain was also painful to 'listen' to, yet probably would have worked ok if I'd read it.

I think the audio experience made some weaker aspects of Hart's writing show up but for all that I was thoroughly entertained. It was violent, the mother was despicable but it is that type of book so I was prepared for all that. I liked how the two storylines between the senator and his 'family' and the New York crime family came together.

I think going into Arabella's background would have been WAY too much information--we already had so many nasty childhood descriptions! I guess it didn't really occur to me that she ought to have a happy ending, but I thought the violence used against her was unpleasant. However, I figured Michael had grown up using violence as a means to an end so it's not surprising that he would use it on her. From the description, though, I wondered if Hart thought the violence was justified when he wrote the book (this is my first Hart book, so I can't gauge).

Does anyone here think this violence was justified? Anyone who thinks the murders of the other orphans should have gone unpunished?

@ 11

About the list--I was confused about that as well. But, then, I was listening to the audiobook and just happened to doze off when the list was first brought up. I had assumed it was a hit list of some kind, but not everyone on the list was killed, were they? Did he find it in Stevan's room? I thought they were discussing it before they got to Stevan's. Or am I wrong? He found the blackmail file in Stevan's room and replaced it there, I know. It's easy to get all of this stuff confused because Hart was being mysterious and suspenseful. :)

About the senator--I think he was being blackmailed and that's it. But I'm not certain.

When you stop and think about it, other than perhaps Julian, none of these people deserved a happy ending. A man like Michael, who lived with violence and murder most of his life, can he ever really change? I think his pregnant girlfriend should have kept away. Abigail is also a very damaged person and should she be left out there to mingle with the general public? I feel sorry for Jessup as he's made watching over her his life's work. Julian should be ok if he stays on his meds., but I found it hard to believe that his little girlfriend really loved him and wasn't just using him to escape from her rotten homelife and to further herself in her art career.

But since the rest of the people in the book were even more rotten, these were the ones to root for. I guess we are supposed to think that the ones that Abigail murdered were so bad that they deserved their fate. Except, if we can believe that Michael can change, why not these men?

Am I the only one who suspected the Abigail might be Michael's sister before it was actually revealed? When she was at the mirror, remembering the dead brother drowned at the brook, I started to wonder if there were other brothers born between that moment at age 10 and when she ran away at 14. Her age would be in the right range. I thought I remembered that the boys were found abandoned by a brook, Julian just a baby. But why didn't anyone figure out that they were Arabella's, since that would be near her cabin?

It didn't bother me one bit that Arabella didn't have a happy ending -- she displayed absolutely no redeeming characteristics or actions. I'm glad Michael didn't kill her, though. I loved his parting words to her.

Sure, there were sections of the story where I had to suspend disbelief a bit -- mainly because my understanding is that the mob doesn't go after "civilians," so their blowing up the restaurant at the beginning seemed out of character. Even going after Elena didn't make a lot of sense, until she was seen as a source of information about Michael.

But overall the story was much more plausible than a number of "thrillers" I've read lately. I listened on audio, and found it to be a good experience -- though I hated the voice the narrator used for Elena.

I also suspected that Abigail was Michael's sister...but only after she insisted that she was not his mother. In my own mind, they had to be related somehow because 1) she seemed much too interested in adopting them to begin with and 2) she clearly had schizophrenia since her "blackouts" were mentioned way at the beginning of the story (and blackouts in this type of story almost always refer to "schizophrenia-induced fugue states")--and what's the chance of two unrelated characters having schizophrenia? I didn't catch the thing about the brook though--that's good.

What got me is that Michael knew SO well how to handle himself in the crime world...yet he let Elena just hop on an international flight out of town under her own name? Since the restaurant bomb was considered terrorist activity (at least that's what the news said), then the FBI certainly would have tracked down the name and description of everyone who worked in that restaurant, matched them to who died in the explosion, and checked the homes of those people--therefore they would have realized that the excellent description of the man with the gun and the long-legged lady fit the description of two of the employees that were missing (but not identified in the remains). Wouldn't Michael have been concerned about Elena being on the no-fly list by that point?

But I know I think too much, and suspension of disbelief is usually the best bet in a book like this!

I was expecting a tie-in between Abigail and the brothers, I thought maybe she was their aunt. I didn't think that Abigail would have had the freedom to come and go from the property while they dragged the lake, and especially once Julian went missing. Lots of suspension of disbelief but still enjoyable though I think The Last Child was better.

#16: I also didn't enjoy that voice for Elena.

17 I hadn't really thought about that -- Elena would have certainly been a person-of-interest in the restaurant explosion. Of course, he mentioned that full-scale mob war broke out after the explosion and the old man's death; that's traditionally a man's world, with proscribed roles for women, so when that all became obvious police might have decided that a foreign woman with no known mob ties was not an obvious suspect. Kind of the same rationale that let Abigail off the hook after the bodies at the farm were found and identified.

19 :) We could just as easily conjecture that the news agency that reported possible terrorist links jumped the gun, as they often do. Or that Michael gave Elena a fake passport at the end of the story, but it simply wasn't mentioned. I guess we should just be happy that it was a well-written story with interesting characters and engaging plot and try not to think about it too much. ;)

I guess we should just be happy that it was a well-written story with interesting characters and engaging plot and try not to think about it too much. ;)

Sounds good to me!

I never suspected Abigail as the aunt - I really thought she might be the mother, even though she denied it. And I also totally missed the mentions of her black-outs early in the book.

And since the police were never more than peripheral characters, I never gave any thought to what they might be thinking - what they would be doing about investigating the explosion or even the killings at the lake.

#16 Elena's voice was terrible, wasn't it?

Haha, Elena's voice made me cringe for the first half of the book, but I finally got used to it...I just convinced myself she had a speech impediment and couldn't help it. :)

I disliked Elena up until she stabbed Jimmy in the barn. Being a fighter bought her points in my book.

Michael was a hit man, a bad guy, but he was trying to quit the life and I think that's why I was able to root for him. Like a Jason Bourne character - he wants to reform and so we want him to succeed.

I never saw Abagail's twist coming and when it did I didn't quite buy into it. But it is very in keeping with the thriller genre so I just played along.

This thread is more than a year old so I don't know if anyone will read this, but it's the only thread I could find where people are discussing Iron House.

I have a question about the list that Michael finds at Ronnie Saint's place. It has five names on it: Billy Walker, Chase Johnson, and George Nichols all make sense, since they were at Iron House when Michael and Julian was there. But it also has the names Salina Slaughter and Abigail Vane and that's where I'm confused.

Who wrote this list, and why? When we first learn that Abigail Vane hired some lawyers to find the boys from Iron Mountain, I figured that the list must be something from those lawyers. But then when we learn about Salina Slaughter I realized it doesn't make any sense. At least not to me, unless someone can explain it.

Very few people know about Salina Slaughter, and even so why would anyone put both Salina Slaughter and Abigail Vane's name on the list?

I wish I could help. It's been quite a while since I read the book, and I can't remember enough detail to answer the question. I don't remember being puzzled by it, but maybe I didn't give it enough thought.

I do know Mark (msf59) over on the 75 Challenge is reading this now. I don't know how far along he is in the book, and at this point in his reading the question might be a spoiler. But maybe when he's done reading and the book is fresh in his mind, he might have thoughts about it.