Split Second by Douglas E. Richards

A new author to me, prompted by a freebie on BookBub, I believe, Doug Richards tells a story about what could be the physics discovery of the century; a way to harness dark energy. Nathan Wexler is the brilliant mind behind the discovery, but very early in the course of the story he and his fiancee, Jenna, are kidnapped and when the kidnapping goes sour, he is murdered, leaving her to escape and try to find out why he was killed, and by whom.

She enlists the aid of  a former Army Ranger turned private investigator, to help her discover the criminals - there are two groups competing to steal Nathan's research - and get justice.

There's a pretty good section on the nature of time, from a scientific and philosophical standpoint; the sort of thing that many of us beat into the ground in late-night dorm room bull sessions, but perhaps more cogently and soberly laid out.

Unfortunately after a while, things bog down in the maneuvering between the two groups trying to capture Wexler's research and exploit it, and I didn't care enough about the characters at that point to find out what happened to them or their time machine.

The Second Life of Nick Mason by Steven Hamilton

Hamilton definitely does a good anti-hero story. By all rights, Nick Mason isn't the kind of character most of us would empathize with, growing up rough and getting into a habit of crime with a small gang of petty thieves through his teen years. He tries to go straight when he marries the love of his life and has a daughter, but the lure of one last big score is too much for him to pass up, and when the job goes bad, a friend gets killed, and he lands in prison for twenty years, everything he wanted is now lost.

The story picks up after Nick has spend five years in jail, when a crime lord who is also behind bars picks Nick to be his outside man, and arranges for the evidence that convicted him to be tainted, so that he is released early, on the condition that Nick will do whatever the boss commands. The boss's business associates back home are getting out of line, and a group of corrupt cops are grabbing a piece of the action, so Nick's assignments involve killing people who are betraying the boss.

Like I said, not exactly the kind of hero I'd pick, but somehow Hamilton makes it work, and makes us root for Nick, perhaps in the slight hope that there is redemption somewhere to be found, and that he can eventually break the chains that bind him to the crime lord and finally go straight. A dark tale, but engrossing and well written.

Spycatcher by Matthew Dunn

Somewhere in my readings I ran across a reference and recommendation of this novel, which is former MI6 employee Dunn's first novel. He's followed it with some more, and with any luck at all, his skills will have developed a bit as he continued writing. I found the plot intriguing, the action realistic, but the dialog was a bit too forced, and the hero, a British assassin named Will, just a bit too tortured and conflicted for my liking.

So I came to a point about halfway through the book where I simply didn't care anymore what happened of the characters. It sat on my nightstand for several weeks and soon it will be time to return it to the library. Ah well.

Make Me by Lee Child

While I was at the library, picking up a novel I'd reserved, I fortuitously saw the latest Reacher novel by Lee Child on the New Books shelf, and immediately snapped it up. I started reading it an hour or so before bedtime, and kept on an hour past, hoping to find out what happened to Reacher, or mor accurately...what Reacher happened to.

In his perpetual wanderings, Reach steps off a train in the middle of flyover country, in a little town called Mother's Rest, mostly because he's curious about the backstory behind the name of the town. He figures he'll stay overnight, check out the local historic museum, and be on his way. Coincidentally (that madness or method upon which dozens of Jack Reacher's adventures hinge), a private investigator named Keever who has a close physical resemblance to Reacher has just been murdered nearby, and his partner, Michelle Chang, a former FBI agent, interests our hero enough to get him to stay a bit longer to look into the disappearance.

Things proceed according to the usual sequence. Local thugs try to intimidate Reacher and end up in the hospital for their troubles. Professional help is brought in to make it clear to him that he's not welcome poking his nose into other people's business, and things escalate in intensity and level of violence necessary from that point forward until the final battle, when all the mysteries become clear.

Reacher and Chang's investigation take them to Chicago in search of a possible crank-case conspiracy theorist who contacted Keever, all the way to L.A. to consult a journalist who may have written an article which sheds light on the nature of the conspiracy, and to Phoenix for a violent confrontation with the Ukrainian mafia. Good ole Jack Reacher times!

Werewolf Cop by Andrew Klavan

I really enjoy Klavan's blog posts on PJMedia, as well as a couple of his earlier police procedurals, so I thought Werewolf Cop sounded like a fun read. It didn't totally disappoint, at least. Klavan's writing was good enough to drag me to the ending, but not quite good enough to make me want to run right out and grab some more, alas!

Hotshot cowboy cop (in fact his nickname is Cowboy) Zach Adams runs up against an adversary he really can't handle when Dominic Abend, a former Nazi turned mobster, shows up in the U.S. Abend and his sidekicks torture and kill a known fence, searching for an artifact which was stolen from him, and then leave a trail of destruction as they interrogate everyone else who had contact with the item.

The trail leads the Cowboy to Europe, where he is attacked and infected with lycanthropy by a werewolf there. The werewolf doubles as an elderly female college professor, who has been hunting Abend for the purpose of destroying a powerful and evil magical artifact which he possesses. When Adams kills the werewolf, he inherits its mission.

Zach's mission is further complicated by the aftermath of an extramarial affair, and his inner struggles as he deals with guilt and the potential consequences of his infidelity if it should be revealed, and by the possible corruption of his partner by the criminal Abend.

Twisted, bloody, introspective - typical Klavan.

Cross Fire by James Patterson

 This was a really quick read. In fact, I started it as I got on the plane in Washington, D.C., and finished it about an hour and a half out of Boise. I'm fairly certain I've read a few of the Alex Cross series in the past, given to my by my late bibliophile friend, Tim G., in one of his library clearing binges. But I certainly haven't kept up to date with the series, and the many loves of Alex Cross, so it was a bit like jumping into the middle in some ways, when Alex proposes to Bree, whom he's been seeing for a few novels, I guess, and his old archenemy Kyle Craig returns...I have no recollection of this villain. Oh well, it still reads quite well, and nothing is lost by not knowing the backstory as long as you understand that Alex is a mega-smart detective, and there are bad guys about.

The plot centers around Kyle's plans for vengeance on Alex for putting him in prison some unknown number of plots ago, and how he assumes the identity of an undercover FBI agent who is returning from the field after years away in order to get close to Alex on a convenient cross-jurisdictional investigation, as Alex is now working for the DC Metro PD. Hey, maybe Murphy's Law knows him!

A pair of snipers who are at least marginally more competent than the last batch to ravage Washington have decided to begin eliminating the "foxes in the henhouse" in the U.S, such as congresscritters who are in bed with the banking industry, corrupt businessmen, and activist federal judges. The bad guys masquerade as homeless men in order to wander around the city without being noticed, and get away with several major assassinations, ratcheting up the pressure on Alex and his team, which includes his masquerading nemesis, Kyle.

There's also a side plot where homeless men are being murdered and mutilated by a paranoid schizophrenic mathematics professor, which provides a bit of entertainment along the way.

After building the tension for hundreds of pages, it all comes to an abrupt climax far to easily resolved.

A good airplane book.

Blue Labyrinth by Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child

 I know I've read several of the Agent Pendergast series by Preston and Child before, including Still Life with Crows and Relic, but for some reason I never put together the idea that they were a series. As expected, this one was twisty and a bit dark, with a truly quirky and unique protagonist.

I think I need to drop back and read a couple books prior to this one to understand what's really going on, because there are a number of cryptic references to earlier events, but the crux of the matter is that one of Pendergast's recently-discovered twin sons, the "evil" twin, who was a serial killer in New York in an earlier story, turns up murdered on the agent's front porch one day, after a long exile in the jungles of Brazil. The agent is never one to leave a good mystery alone, and so he embarks on his own quest to find out who has killed his son, whom he despises, and why the crime was committed.

In parallel, one of Pendergast's old friends, detective d'Agosta, is involved with his own murder mystery, involving the bludgeoning death in an isolated corner of a museum, of one of the technicians who works in the department which handles old skeletons...skeletons in the closet indeed!

This one gets violent, bloody and twisty pretty quickly. I definitely have to drop back and read some of the earlier books so I get some of the major characters' back stories. Preston & Child are always good.

Personal by Lee Child

 The first half dozen pages of this novel, I'm thinking, "Hasn't Child already written this story - One Shot?" Turned into the weak plot of a movie starring Tom Cruise as Reacher? And the rights have been sold to make nine Reacher movies? Dear God, please let them find someone believeable to play Reacher - and soon!

But I digress.

A very skilled sniper appears to be "auditioning" for a job, which probably involves taking shots at one or more of the world leaders scheduled to appear soon at the G8 summit in London. The French, Russian, British and U.S. intelligence services have narrowed the suspects down to a half-handful of ex-military snipers from the U.S., U.S.S.R., and U.K., who are unaccounted for. The American is a former Army shooter who Reacher put away in jail sixteen years ago - for a fifteen year sentence.

When a general whom Reacher owes a favor contacts him and asks him to track down the sniper and stop him, it's an offer he can't really refuse - especially when he finds the rural hideout where the sniper has been shooting at targets of Reacher's head for months on end. This story, of course, just wouldn't fly without the addition of a female sidekick for our hero, and he gets a "rookie" from the State Department as his "minder", though it's not certain who's minding whom over the long haul.

The action moves swiftly to France, then London, and there are the usual  plot twists and awesome fight scenes as Reacher plows over the competition, and chases down his target. The final twist was not unexpected, especially if you take the title to heart.

Another fun and quick read from Child

The President's Dirty Little Secret by John Russell

Giving you a twofer today, with the 2nd in a pair of books I simply could not motivate myself to finish.

In the interests of full disclosure, I was sent a copy of this book, gratis, for review by the author because I had enjoyed an earlier published work. Also in the interests of full disclosure, I didn't enjoy this one nearly as well.

Though I am not a gun nut in most senses of the word, I was raised in a semi-rural area of Idaho and have a nodding acquaintance with firearms and gun vocabulary, so it bothered me right away when one of the police is asked, after an assassination attempt, what model of gun was used, and he replies "A Saturday Night Special". Saturday Night Special is slang term for a small caliber easily concealed handgun, arising out of the Jim Crow laws in the South, not a particular make or type of gun. It's as wildly vague as the current "assault rifle" and has pretty much fallen out of usage today, which leads me to the following:

Although the story appears to be "contemporary", it refers to an attitude about AIDS being a "gay disease" and a judgement from God on homosexual behavior that went out thirty years ago, for the most part. This and a Hinkley-like assassination attempt, with Secret Service agents taking wounds to the chest that are easily stopped with a Kevlar vest - standard issue today - makes me think this book was resurrected from a very early draft, after initial success with the author's other novels, with insufficient editing.

Too much trouble suspending my disbelief, and the protagonist, an alcohol sodden journalist, didn't engage either my interest or sympathy rapidly enough, so I gave up about twenty pages in.

Never Go Back by Lee Child

 Susan Turner is just a pretty voice on the phone, the CO of his old MP command, to Jack Reacher, as he bulls his way through his last adventure, but he decides he needs to see her in person, and ask her out to dinner, so he hitches all the way to the DC area and ventures on base to meet her. When he arrives, however, he discovers that she has been thrown in jail for allegedly accepting bribes and stashing the money in the Cayman Islands, and someone has filed homicide charges against him for the beating death of a suspect he interviewed sixteen years ago. To make sure that Reacher really feels the heat, he's also the target of a paternity suit from a woman he allegedly had sex with while he was in Korea fifteen years before. Whoever is behind all this has made a careful assessment of Reacher's behavior and decided that his tendency would be to take it on the run instead of facing the charges. Bad idea.

When some enlisted thugs come along to encourage him to move on, he shows them his own special brand of encouragement with which we are all familiar. The new, temporary CO of the MP detachment implements an obscure clause of Reacher's enlistment to re-activate his military status (Hmm...wonder why he never gets a paycheck in the course of this book?) and basically confines him to the base. When Jack begins to dig deeper into the case against Turner, he gets framed for the severe beating of Turner's attorney, to add more fuel to the fire.

So it's not unexpected for us Reacher fans when Jack decides to "bend" all the rules, and breaks Susan out of jail, and goes for a walk on the wild side while they both try to figure out whose toes Susan has stepped on that has the access to old files as well as current intel to make criminal cases appear out of thin air against the duo.

In this iteration, we see the Reacher we all know and love create chaos and confusion among his enemies, but we also get to see, perhaps for the first time, a more tender version of Reacher when he travels to Los Angeles to discover the daughter he never knew. Another good (and very fast) read from Child.

The Eye of Moloch by Glenn Beck

 This book is the sequel to The Overton Window by Beck. Molly's little band of freedom fighters are on the run from government forces, and not likely to make it to any safe haven soon. Ben has been imprisoned for a while, then conscripted into the armed force pursuing them, though he has no stomach for it. His father's organization continues to manipulate the government and people of the U.S. through its control of the media narrative. As they said in The Princess Bride, "It would take a miracle..."

This story seems pretty unrelentingly dark throughout, which is what the author is going for - to convey the sense of hopelessness that Molly and her bodyguard Thom Hollis and Ben all are feeling against the overwhelming odds.

A great deal of the book is spent exploring the points of view of the bad guys, like white supremacist George Pierce, and Warren Landers, the leader of mercenary corporation Talion, Arthur Gardner's right hand man, and Aaron Doyle, the shadowy figure at the top of the pyramid of Earth's secret masters.

A quote from the lips of Warren Landers, to George Pierce:

"In your own language, then, abortion on demand has murdered seventeen million blacks, and counting...We've normalized the voluntary termination of their babies into just another form of birth control - and a sacred civil right of liberated, empowered women. That's the illusion we've created to make another genocidal weapon in the race war you've always wanted."

Interesting perspective on abortion on demand, eh?

And another interesting bit:

"This 'kill list' to which Mr. Landers referred was a relatively new development, at least among governments that still tipped their hats to the rule of law. Together with a small contingent of advisors the President would regularly meet to nominate and then pass judgement on foreign (and now domestic) 'militant' individuals deemed eligible for termination without the benefit of due process."

If you're not too sure this can actually happen in this country, check out Beck's afterword at the back, with references to all of the scary scenarios he describes in the book. See the National Defense Authorization Act, which legalizes martial law in the U.S., allows the military to indefinitely detain people without trial, and authorizes drone strikes on American soil, if the person is determined to be "engaged in combat" against the U.S. We've already killed American citizens without benefit of a trial overseas, it's a slippery slope to do it here, too. Maybe you trust the current administration not to do it, but what about the next? It's very seldom that the federal government voluntarily limits or recants its powers.

I hope and pray that it never comes to the state of affairs described in this book, but it's just a hop, skip and a jump away if we're not careful about the erosion of our freedoms.

Not quite as good, perhaps, as the first book, so we'll see how things wrap up in the final installment of the trilogy.

Agenda 21 by Glen Beck

They just don't write dystopian fiction like they used to. Agenda 21 is the tale of Emmeline, who dwells in a compound run by the Authorities along with dozens? hundreds? thousands? (we never really know) of other folks who have been removed from their land and lives by the results of the UN's Agenda 21, a radical green program which forces most of them to walk on a treadmill most of the day producing enough energy to "pay back" the government for the cost of feeding and housing them. Others are assigned as transport workers, manually towing the carts that move people and goods from place to place, caregivers, who watch over the children in the Authorities' crèche, or gatekeepers, who keep track of all the people in each compound, and report all their movements to the Authorities.

Emmeline appears to be the only child who was actually raised by her parents, the rest have been educated by the state, and know an entirely different version of history than she has been taught. There are hints that there may be other "home schooled" around somewhere, as she is mocked a couple of times for being "one of them". The Authorities even control who will mate with one another, pairing fertile couples to keep the population steady.

I think Beck and his co-writer are trying to go for a Katniss Everdeen type of heroine here, but I'm not sure they got there. Emmeline's mother, we find out after she is taken away for some imagined offense and "recycled", left Emmeline some illegal and subversive materials concealed in her sleeping mat; a map of the United States, a knife, a bible, and some matches, as well as some relatively innocuous photographs of happier times. Emmeline finally goes rogue when her baby daughter, Elsa, is going to be taken away to be raised by the government elsewhere. This happens near the end of the book, and I think the authors are planning on some sequel action.

Don't bother.

Red Cell by Richard Marcinko

 

After the first Rogue Warrior book, Marcinko decided to try his hand at fiction, with himself as the hero. Ahh...even more fictional than the first one.

The story begins in Japan, where Marcinko has a contract to test the security systems at an airport. While he's skulking about, he surprises some North Korean nationals breaking into a crate of nuclear weapons components, and terminates them with extreme prejudice. This stirs things up with his Japanese special forces buddy, Tosho, as well as some of his old contacts with the Navy. Following the trail may lead to some very high places back in Washington, D.C., but, of course, Marcinko is undaunted.

His next gig is to help the CEO of a potential defense contractor and his team of tech-weenies get ready for a war games scenario on the estate belonging to a former SecDef, Griffiths (who is, amazingly, one of those people back in DC who Marcinko suspects of being involved with the weapons smuggling). The team's training exercises and the game, itself, are very amusing, as one of Marcinko's rules of warfare seems to be "cheat whenever possible".

After the successful conclusion of the competition, Marcinko is drafted back into the Navy, in charge of his old Red Cell counterterrorism team, which has fallen on hard times, now that it's run by bean counters instead of real warriors. To bring them up to speed, he runs some more security testing on the naval yard at Seal Beach, where he encounters even more evidence that nuclear arms are being smuggled by someone with powerful connections.

The novel eventually winds to a not very surprising conclusion, with some good murder and mayhem along the way, filled with all the details Marcinko's real world experience can provide. The plot, unfortunately, is not all that gripping. We can only hope his narrative skills improve somewhere down the road in this series.

A Wanted Man by Lee Child

Reacher rocks again! He just falls into these situations, when he's totally trying to mind his own business. As the story begins, Reacher is standing on the onramp of an Interstate near Omaha, trying to hitch a ride to Virginia to meet up with a woman he only knows from talking to her on the phone. He's sporting a broken nose from his most recent mishaps and adventures, and isn't a likely candidate for most people to pick up in the middle of the night. Finally he's given a ride by three people who claim to be coworkers for an unnamed company, headed home after a long sales trip - two men and a woman.

However, the two men are a pair of murderers being pursued by the local sheriff and the FBI, and the woman is their hostage. The men have threatened to kill her if she tells Reacher anything, but they've picked both him and the women up in order to confuse the law enforcement types on the lookout for two men traveling by themselves. It doesn't take Reacher long to figure out that something is not quite right in this scenario, but before he can do as we expect and rescue the woman from her captors, he is left at a motel in the middle of nowhere after one of the men takes a pistol shot at him and misses, badly.

Reacher eventually hooks up with FBI agent Sorenson, a tough Scandinavian woman with a no-nonsense attitude, who nevertheless falls for Reacher's directness and honesty and agrees not to arrest him while they pursue the fugitives together. The whole situation is not exactly as it seems, and Reacher has stumbled into a massive counterrorism operation being run by a number of TLAs, full of double and triple agents, domestic and foreign terrorists, and just a handful of local yokels caught in the dragnet.

We don't see Reacher's usual emphasis on mano a mano physical combat in this book, but when the action finally comes, it's fast, furious, and bloody. I had a very tough time putting this one down at bedtime.

Oh, by the way, there's a description of Reacher on page 156. It sounds nothing at all like Tom Cruise. What's wrong with film makers these days?

Above Reproach by J. D. Kinman

A blogger whom I follow, Ordinary American, has published his first novel, Above Reproach. The story is too darned close to possible for comfort, much like Clancy's story about an airliner being used as a bomb to destroy the Capitol building while a joint session of Congress was convened presaged the "unimaginable" horror of 9/11. The underlying premise is that a far-sighted terrorist mastermind began placing sleeper agents in the United States decades ago, and many of them are in positions of importance and influence, unsuspected.

The mastermind begins to activate his sleepers, their missions predetermined, and the first attacks are incredibly successful, from the terrorists' point of view. Seemingly innocuous men and women (actually men in disguise), in a restaurant and a shopping mall, suddenly open fire with automatic weapons on shoppers and diners. The result is a horrendous massacre, and the attackers get away cleanly. The main stream media and many politicians react predictably, condemning the gun culture and outdated Second Amendment rights that allowed such a tragedy to occur.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch...

Dillon Cole is a former federal marshal who now lives near Dallas, raising horses, flying airplanes, making saddles, and keeping his skills sharp on the rifle and pistol range, with the help of his friend, Ramon "Ram" Alvarez. Ram is a former gun for hire from Mexico who turned his life around and became a firearms and tactics instructor for the Mexican federales. When we first meet Dillon, he is working out on a tactical pistol course with Ram, and demonstrates that he's still as good as he was when he was working as a marshal, and can shoot equally well with his left and right hand.

This scene demonstrates one of the solid aspects of Kinman's writing, as it sets up in advance the believability of a later scene, which takes place when Cole and his wife, Vicki, are attending a speech by a conservative journalist friend on a college campus in Tulsa. Four "students" armed with automatic weapons try to turn the auditorium into a slaughterhouse, but Dillon manages to kill two of them with his concealed pistol before sustaining a wound in his right arm, and having to switch hands. He takes down the third with a southpaw shot, before passing out from blood loss.

Lest you think Kinman can only write good action sequences, I have to tell you that the author had me leaking tears for a good fifty pages, early in the novel, relating the story of how Dillon and Vicki worked with Angel Flight. For some months they have been helping a young lady, Shelly, stricken with leukemia to travel from Tulsa, where she lives with her father, Owen, to Fort Worth, where she receives chemotherapy. Angel Flight is a real group of pilots and airplane owners who provide free transportation for medical treatment to those who could not otherwise afford it. The story of how the Coles go above and beyond the call of duty to provide for Shelly and Owen, a widowed, disabled, Gulf War veteran, is guaranteed to ring all your emotional bells.

This is a darned good read, and a chilling look at some possible problems with the way we as a nation are dealing with potential terrorist attacks. Dillon Cole gets to deliver a great speech at a Congressional hearing near the end of the book about our Second Amendment rights and the proper role of our elected representatives that's well worth the price of admission. There are some loose ends here and there in the book referring to previous events in some of the characters' lives that makes me wonder if Kinman wrote an earlier novel that I missed, or whether a prequel/sequel or two are in the works.

The Affair by Lee Child

This was such a prototypically "Jack Reacher" book in so many ways. First, it turns out to be the prequel of sorts to the first Reacher book published, The Killing Floor. It takes place in 1997, when Reacher is still an MP, before he leaves the Army.

He is sent to a small town in Mississippi, Carter Crossing, which is barely hanging on to existence due to the presence of a military base nearby which is used to train special forces troops. Someone, possibly from the base, has murdered a beautiful young woman in the town, and Reacher is sent go undercover (as much as a brute like him can) outside the fence to find out what the local sheriff knows.

He finds that the sheriff in town is not exactly what he expected - she's a former Marine Corps MP, named Deveraux. She's a little out of her depth in a murder investigation, but Reacher soon brings her up to speed, while trying to maintain the confidentiality he's been sworn to by his CO, Garber. The murder could turn out to be a political hot potato, as the commander on base is the son of Congressman Riley. Reacher soon learns that this is not the first murder with a similar MO, either, the killings started about nine months before his arrival in town.

The book contains the required faceoff between Reacher and some local thugs. As always, he puts them down quickly and efficiently, without doing too much permanent damage. There's a great conversation after the thugs gather four more of their friend to attack Jack in a dark alley. After Jack takes them all on and puts most of them in the hospital, he's talking to Chief Deveraux:

"'I gave them the chance to come back in numbers. And what did they do? They added two more guys. That's all. They showed up with a total of six. What is that about? It's deliberate disrespect.'
Deveraux said, 'I think most people would consider six against one to be fairly respectful.'
'But I warned them. I told them they'd need more. I was trying to be fair. But they wouldn't listen. It was like talking to the Pentagon.'"

I love Reacher.

One of the great things about this character is that he just does what he knows to be the right thing, without respect for what his orders are, whether it's strictly legal or not, or whether anyone agrees with him. He's like an unstoppable force of nature. Reacher readers are going to go absolutely nuts over this one.

Last Snow by Eric Van Lustbader

Over the years, Van Lustbader has written some fairly good novels, from his early fantasy in the Dai San series, to one of the Bourne adventures. Unfortunately, this one isn't really some of his best work. In fact, I grew so disillusioned with it that I gave up rapidly, and had to look up the characters' names just to write this review.

It's the sequel to an earlier work about Jack McClure, an ATF agent who once saved the President's daughter from a sadistic kidnapper, First Daughter. In this book, McClure is traveling with the President's entourage in Russia when the president sends him on a mission to investigate the death of a Senator in Capri. He gets sidetracked on the way by interfering in a squabble between a Russian mafia thug and his mistress, who turns out to be a secret agent for the FSB, then picks up another impediment in his investigation in the form of the president's daughter stowing away on his plane.

All of these people have deep psychological disturbing issues in their past, and the book begins to read more like a soap opera than a thriller after a while. It's a pity; I thought I could count on Mr. Van Lustbader for a good read.

The Overton Window by Glenn Beck

The Overton Window is the story of Noah Gardner, the privileged son of an advertising agency giant, who becomes aware, finally, that there are more momentous things going on in the world around him than his amusements and sexual conquests. One day at work at his father's business, he notices an intern, Molly Ross, posting an announcement about a political meeting held by an organization that is part of the Tea Party movement. Suddenly smitten by her obvious physical charms, he attempts to charm her, and when that doesn't work, decides to attend the meeting, to try and get to know her better, probably for the purpose of seducing her, but it soon turns into more of an obsession than mere lust.

At approximately the same time, Noah attends the first part of a meeting with a group of government agents who are concerned that a secret memo published by their department, planning for a Homeland Security emergency, and which will violate some groups' civil rights, has become public. Noah's father, Arthur, presents them with a plan to discredit the memo, and to further advance a progressive agenda that has been slowly encroaching on civil liberties in the U.S. for decades.

Noah attends the patriots' meeting later that evening, and is present when a group of provocateurs start trouble there, and the New York police immediately break up the meeting and throw most of the participants into jail. Noah's father's lawyer is able to get Noah released, but in an inexplicable streak of altruism, Noah convinces his lawyer that the whole bust was a setup from the beginning and the lawyer manages to get the rest of the detainees released, as well.

The Overton window of the title turns out later on in the story to refer to a method of visualizing the changes introduced over time to the canon of acceptable political dialogue in this country. For example, it would have been inconceivable twenty years ago that people would submit to full body scans and patdowns by TSA agents in order to fly anywhere in this country, but as incremental security measure changes have been slowly added, each necessitated by some perceived threat or crisis, we have now come to accept those practices, for the most part. The same thing applies to no-knock warrants, national security letters, and the propagation of SWAT teams in police departments all over the country.

Beck doesn't definitely attribute all of this to some vast progressive conspiracy, exactly, but fits it into the framework of a progressive agenda worldwide which acts upon the assumption that the elite, whether political or economic, are the only people who are capable of "ruling", and have stealthily taken over our government, through the process of corrupting our elected officials.

In a scenario reminiscent of Rahm Emmanuel's quote, "never let a crisis go to waste", Arthur Gardner and his fellow progressive manipulators have set into motion a plot that will incriminate the Tea Party types in an attack using an atomic bomb on an American City. When it comes to fruition, it will result in the arrest and internment of huge numbers of people deemed subversive by the Department of Homeland Security. The "thriller" portion of the novel is the tale of how some of Molly's friends and Noah discover the plot and attempt to thwart it.

There are vast swaths of this book that are pure Founding Fathers political writings, proclaimed and discussed by Molly and her fellow travelers, and a ton of facts and events ripped from recent headlines that make this novel not as far-fetched as it might seem at first. There's a wealth of references and additional information included in the back of the book, and Beck makes no bones about the fact that he intends this novel to be a wake up call for its readers, and to get them thinking about where this country is headed.

As far as thrillers go, the story wasn't all that tense, but it's certainly a thought-provoking read.

Gideon's Sword by Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child

Preston and Child generally write some pretty good fiction together. Gideon's Sword is the story of Gideon Crew, whose father was gunned down by federal agents when he was 12, and he doesn't learn until he is an adult and his mother is dying, that his father was one of the good guys, killed by a general named Tucker who feared he would disclose a secret that would take down Tucker and his friends. Gideon spent time as an art thief as a young man, and uses his technical expertise on security systems, plus a good dose of social engineering, throughout the story.

It turns out that Gideon's quest to destroy Tucker for killing his father doesn't take very long, in terms of the novel, and then he is recruited by a contractor for the Department of Homeland Security to do some work for them. He's halfway blackmailed into doing the work, as the contractor seems to know all about Gideon's past, and then discouraged from turning the job down to follow his own long term plans when they tell him that he only has a short time to live, with an inoperable aneurysm in his brain that could explode any time.

His mission is to intercept a Chinese defector, Mark Wu, at the airport in New York and to obtain certain information Wu is suspected to be bringing into the country about a "super weapon" the Chinese have been developing. I began to wonder at this point why in the world a secretive contractor for DHS would want to use an untried untested new hire to do the job, and continued to wonder it all the way to the denouement, when the head of the company discloses that all of their computer simulations showed that any other option would result in failure, while using Crew - an unpredictable rogue - had a strong probability of success.

This story has a very twisty plot, with a lot of creative details, but there were just too many unbelievable bits for me. Crew's social engineering skills always seemed up to the task at hand, and I had a hard time believing that so many people would believe his lies, especially when he used them on naturally suspicious people like police and TSA agents. It was a quick read, but I didn't feel it was Preston & Child's best work.

The Temple Dogs by Warren Murphy and Molly Cochran

Review written January, 2000

Warren Murphy and Richard Sapir used to write a series which I really enjoyed - The Destroyer Series. I collected them up till about #60 or so, but eventually lost interest when I began to focus on science fiction. The interplay between the two main characters was extremely witty and they had a lot of good martial arts action. I think they may still be writing them, but somewhere along the line Murphy teamed up with Cochran to write some other novels, among them a couple of good Arturian legend novels.
 
In Temple Dogs, Murphy & Cochran tell a pretty fair yarn about the conflict between a Yakuza family and a Mafia family. The plot revolves around the killing of a newlywed couple by the heir to a Mafia family, who is humiliated by being thrown out of the hotel where the wedding reception is being held. The bride's grandfather decides to avenge their murder, as the police cannot bring the murderer to justice, and is himself beaten to death by thugs. The brother of the bride, Miles Haverford, journeys to Japan to ask the help of the Yakuza chieftain, and old friend of his grandfather.
 
I won't get into all of the plot and events of the novel, but it did have a couple of flaws. First, Miles is a spoiled rich kid who, in the course of events, must prove himself to the members of the Yakuza before they will help him. He eventually does this through his superior character, and then is trained in the way of the Yakuza. This training goes by awfully quickly, and it's been my experience with the martial arts that proficiency is usually gained over the course of years, rather than weeks, so I was a little disappointed in the reality gap there.
 
Also, the heir apparent to the Yakuza, Sato, starts out very antagonistic (to say the least) to Miles, and about 2/3 of the way through the book undergoes an amazing change of heart, which carries the whole outcome of the novel. I just couldn't sustain my belief in the sudden turnabout. He was arrogant, cruel, and abusive, and suddenly becomes humble, kind and compassionate.
 
Despite all this, the novel was fairly entertaining, with some creative violence, good dialogue, and interesting plot twists.