Higgins thriller has a familiar plot that falters

“Rough Justice” by Jack Higgins (G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 326 pgs., $25.95)

To call suspense writer Jack Higgins’ latest effort two-dimensional probably does a disservice to the flat surfaces of the world.

“Rough Justice” has all the familiar Higgins’ elements. Set in London, it includes a shadowy network of international criminals and scenes that unfold in Kosovo, Northern Ireland, Moscow and Beirut.

The good guys are off-the-radar British and American operatives who appear to report directly to the English prime minister and the U.S. president. None of this agency bureaucracy for them.

The bad guys are menacing Russians, secretive radical Islamists and murderous ex-IRA enforcers.

The action starts when clandestine American agent Blake Johnson, under direct orders from the president, takes an unofficial information-gathering swing through Kosovo. There he meets his British equivalent, the suave but quiet Harry Miller. At a secluded inn, the two come across a brutal Russian military commander terrorizing the local Muslims and their women. One thing quickly leads to another and the Russian is dead with a bullet between his eyes. (There are a lot of bullets between the eyes in this book.)

The Russians weren’t supposed to be in Kosovo and so official action is out of the question. But President Putin — oddly, Higgins inserts the real Putin into the book, while sticking with a fictional U.S. president — is not pleased.

So the Russian commander’s death ripples quietly across international lines and soon just about every global bad guy you can imagine has it in for Miller.

They don’t stand much chance. Miller is a Jason Bourne without the amnesia, a James Bond with the license to kill but no sense of humor about it. He has a human side, sure, as shown by the affection, however cool, he shows his American actress wife, to whom he’s always rushing home to see her triumphs on the London stage. But for the most part, he’s a calculated killing machine with a taste for good Scotch.

One problem: Miller’s wife doesn’t know what he really does, believing him a desk jockey for a British intelligence agency. Sure enough, as the bodies pile up, Miller’s secret life protecting the civilized world from the savage forces trying to assault it — or something like that, since his motives are never entirely clear — comes home to haunt him in tragic fashion.

After that, look out bad guys.

Higgins attempts to paint a dark picture with characters shaded in gray, but his heart’s not really in it. Miller and his colleagues don’t seem all that bothered by what they do and his enemies are cardboard cutouts of creeps. These personalities are complex the way highway billboards are rural folk art.

“Villains, the lot of you,” Harry’s sister tries telling one of his friends.

“They keep people out of harm’s way in a world gone mad,” the friend counters. “They are soldiers who take care of those things ordinary folk can’t.”

For a few scattered pages, following the fortunes of those soldiers makes for mildly entertaining reading. But for the most part, “Rough Justice” is more like a rough draft of something the veteran Higgins could have done much better.