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HOWARD GIORDANO is a native New Yorker, now residing in Naples, Florida. A 20-year career in advertising preceded a decade with The New York Racing Association (Aqueduct, Belmont and Saratoga Racetracks) as Executive Director of Marketing and TV, and later as President of the New York City Off-Track Betting Corporation. Writing short fiction since 1990, Howard has sixteen different stories published in twenty-six literary magazines. One story was a finalist in a Glimmer Train Press contest, and another, a racetrack tale, was a contest finalist in The Thoroughbred Times, a national racing magazine, and published in their ten-year anthology of winning stories. Howard's first full-length fiction, TRACKING TERROR, was published in late 2011 and has received many five-star reviews. The novel was awarded the Bronze Medal Award in the 2012 Reader's Favorite International Contest, finishing ahead of a number of top-of-the-line thriller authors. In early 2015, the novel won first prize in the USA Regional Excellence Book Awards recognizing TRACKING TERROR for its outstanding depiction of the novel's locale, New York City. His second novel, THE SECOND TARGET, is a suspense-driven tale of revenge. The plot is based on an actual event that occurred during the opening days of America's involvement in WWII. The novel was released in the spring of 2016 and has received a number of outstanding reviews. Howard is writing his third novel, a thriller dealing with the scourge of human trafficking and drug smuggling. Howard is a member of the Florida Writers Association.
Reviewed by Joel R. Dennstedt for Readers' Favorite
Private investigator Luke Rizzo is hired by a wealthy, highbrow married woman to locate a father she has never known, which leads our main character into a fascinating if somewhat byzantine tangled scheme of German history and revenge, FBI intrusions and evasions, impersonal sexual liaisons and retreats and then repeats, and a cat-and-mouse pursuit of a psychopathically determined killer and his would-be victims.
The Second Target, a thriller by Howard Giordano, is an inconsistent but entertaining read. The novel is punctuated by bursts of inspired plotting and deeply interesting, engaging, and provocative scenes. Howard Giordano is skilled at creating the highly active plot development demanded by such a thriller as The Second Target. The reader rarely finds himself bogged down within mundane, inactive moments, though he sometimes feels himself to be in the company of shallow and undeveloped minor characters – such as the two FBI agents, who seem more interested in brief and not-so-witty moments of inane repartee than in pursuing leads provided by Mr. Rizzo – or rolling his strained and incredulous mental eyes when a scheduled victim, having apprehended and restrained his would-be murderer, after kicking his foe’s loaded gun under the chair where he is tied, abruptly leaves the room.
Fortunately, such incidents are extremely rare, if unsettling, and the story moves along quite well. Giordano, as mentioned, has moments of true brilliance in plotting his intriguing tale, and some of the confrontations between the good guys and the bad are truly entertaining. Luke Rizzo could become an interesting protagonist for future novels.
