The Osiris Initiative: A Review

Osiris with Retainers Hieroglyph

Here at The Boron Heist, we have previously reviewed quite a few works by indie author Ryan McGinnis including his last novel Tears of the Dragon and his newest short story “The Musician’s Daughter.” Now, McGinnis has penned the second major installment of his Xavier Greene spy-assassin series: the upcoming novel The Osiris Initiative! At The Boron Heist, we’ve been chewing the fat for a couple days, reading through and ruminating on McGinnis’s newest effort. The novel is an improvement upon Tears and shows McGinnis constantly developing his ability to interweave complex plot threads from multiple narrators while hedging his subtext more deeply into the plot and spinning an electrifying yarn for his readers.

In The Osiris Initiative, the first five chapters are each told from a different perspective. While a few of these–Xavier, Logan, the mechanic from Tears–drive the plot, one is an innocent bystander, of sorts, caught in the crossfire of a mysterious organization’s war on the Citadel: Xavier’s employer. The shifting perspectives, each packed with their own action sequences and resultant carnage, engage the reader from the very beginning and make it difficult to put the book down for quite some time. We learn that Martinez has gone rogue since the events of Tears some months prior, that Logan has retired to a ranch in Montana, and that Xavier is almost fully healed from the havoc the Silver Wraith, Liliya Orloff, wreaked upon his body during the last mission. Now, Xavier has been tasked with killing the would-be assassin of a United Arab Emirates royal and Logan is being wooed by executives from the cryptic Axion corporation.

When Xavier’s mission goes south, an obvious double-cross by an outside party, Logan begins to question the motives of Axion, and Martinez finds a bounty on Xavier’s head advertised on the Dark Web, the three professionals’ destinies become intertwined once again in this rousing new political-action thriller.

Unlike Tears of the Dragon, the full nature and implications of the the Osiris Initiative at the core the novel’s plot are only traced in part. The group that put out the kill order on Xavier’s life and that is also targeting Citadel safehouses and stations has likewise created a code to link together all cameras on the planet, which are connected to the internet. Together with facial recognition software, they hope to be able to track any individual, anywhere, at nearly any time and to develop the world’s most sophisticated network against anyone they perceive as threatening their interests. While we live in a police state in America now, in the real world, and the NSA collects all our metadata into personnel files, the fear of a panopticon, of a universalized surveillance system, seems to be waning. However, The Osiris Initiative may serve to remind readers of the horrors of this system, as well as the fact that our political institutions are not run by idealistic, humanitarian sovereigns, but instead by power-hungry persons controlled by corporate powers. When every move you make is tracked, is it possible to truly act freely? Xavier’s foiled attempts to avoid the panoptic surveillance system aimed directly at registering his face and sending assassins his way foregrounds our own inability to operate from the shadows. And sometimes, operating from the shadows is the only way to combat dehumanizing bureaucratic forces.

Like those much-maligned (by me and Scorsese at least) superzero films whose preponderance signifies a lack of faith in our institutions and in our public defenders to provide our defense, Xavier Greene’s, Logan, and Martinez’s efforts in The Osiris Initiative provide readers with much-needed catharsis. The danger of marvel narratives is that only those endowed with superhuman power or grotesque economic advantage have the power to counter corrupt institutions. However, Logan and Martinez provide a counternarrative of the average person’s ability to do likewise and therefore, the novel avoids some of the major pitfalls of hero and action texts.

For all this talk of deeper meanings and implications, The Osiris Initiative is really anything but heady. The ideas are couched deeply enough into the text so as not to burden the plot, and instead function as interesting background to the modern world that makes up the foundation of McGinnis’s plot: our world. The relevance of that world to readers renders it real for them while the fight sequences, chase sequences, and bureaucratic intrigue drive the plot forward in this nail-biter of a novel. The Osiris Initiative is a thrilling read with plot twists and turns that keep the reader on the edge of their seat with a cliffhanger climax that promises many morsels of cinematic excess and enjoyable reading ahead.

The Osiris Initiative will be released on March 21st through Amazon books, so pre-order your copy today!

“The Musician’s Daughter”: The Emerging Mythos of an Assassin

Bucharest, Romania Skyline by Michael Tompsett

In one week (March 21st, 2022), Brownsville, Texas based Indie author Ryan McGinnis is releasing a new novel, The Osiris Initiative, in the Xavier Greene assassin-spy series. In the interim, he has made available a short work in the same universe entitled “The Musician’s Daughter: A Xavier Greene Thriller.” which delves deeper into the history of its titular character and ought to increase excitement for the new novel as well. The Boron Heist has previously reviewed a few of McGinnis’s short works (“Sketch” and “A Good Night’s Sleep”) as well as his first novel Tears of the Dragon, so you know we’re fans. His new story can be accessed for free by joining McGinnis’s email list here and if you read it to end, you’ll even find a nice blurb on Tears from yours truly.

In “The Musician’s Daughter,” the setting is Bucharest, Romania where Xavier Greene has been stationed to bring a politician, Andrei Luca, to justice for his backroom dealings with the Romanian Humanist Party, a political organization described as a thinly-veiled front for the proliferation of specialized radios called Music-Boxes. The purpose of the device is not discussed in full and one is compelled to call it a MacGuffin, or physical object that propels the narrative forward and provides it a visual center. While the place, and indeed the purpose of Xavier’s mission, are explained, the time is left open and the reader is therefore uncertain whether the events of the narrative unfold before or after those of Tears of the Dragon. What we do know is that Xavier mentions his rise to top-level assassin status in the Citadel, a secret organization that hires out spies and other professionals for high profile missions, possibly with nefarious intentions. By the end of McGinnis’s first novel, however, Xavier’s relationship to the Citadel is anything, if not tenuous, and therefore the reader might assume that this story is a prequel.

As in most good prequels and shorter works in a larger corpus or universe, this tale introduces more backstory to the protagonist. Namely, we learn that Xavier’s line of work is an attempt–perhaps unconsciously–to follow in the footsteps of his deceased father. Further, the reader learns that if Xavier is to follow his father’s example, that his work may inevitably lead to his death as well. The sins of the father… even the absent and long-dead father, eh?

Xavier’s mission to bring the politician to justice and to claim the Music-Box device for his employers starts off smoothly and in a way that demonstrates Xavier’s professional ethics. When the second half of the mission involves extracting the device from a nonchalant, professional spy, Mihail Vulpe, Xavier exceeds the boundaries of the job, rendering it a kill-order operation. As Mihail’s organization closes in on Xavier, will he be able to escape with his life, with the device in tow, and without killing an innocent bystander–Mihail’s orphaned daughter Ana? In “The Musician’s Daughter,” McGinnis has produced a kinetic piece of short, action writing with moments of deeper reflection on fate and the ways in which history recurs, in which our lives play out eternal conflicts that might, or might not, preclude our ability to choose our direction in this world.