Berkley Edition, May 1997

If you are familiar with Dale Brown’s books – particularly those that feature Patrick McLanahan as the protagonist – then you will already be aware that this book is chock full of whiz-bang military hardware, outlandish military threats to the United States and save-the-country heroics by McLanahan. In this case the bad guys are the Iranians and they aren’t threatening the U.S. as a whole, just the U.S.’s aircraft carrier group in the Persian Gulf. The action kicks off with the Iranians detecting and destroying a U.S. spy ship and capturing 13 of the “civilian” crewmen – most of whom were, in fact, spies. Nevermind that the U.S. was doing something that is really shouldn’t have been doing; we needed to kick some butt to get the Iranians back in line. But how?

The obvious answer: take an experimental B-2 strategic bomber, equip it with the latest in high-tech gizmos, assign it to a super-secret intelligence agency and assemble a crew of mostly civilian crewmen, led by McLanahan, to act at the “tip of the spear.” Yes, I know this all sounds highly implausible and it is.  So if you aren’t willing to suspend your disbelief and go along for the whole implausible ride, then just forget about this book.

It is wordy and Brown always gets way deep into details of military hardware that may or may not be accurate.  So the appeal is mostly to military geeks and those who like military escapism.

I had a hard time letting go of my skepticism on this one.

4 out of 10.

Pocket Books, 2001.

Dan Brown is best known for The Da Vinci Code and its sequel, Angels and Demons, both of which were made into movies starring Tom Hanks.  Deception Point was published between those two blockbusters, but the story is unrelated, has a different cast of characters and, as yet, has not been made into a Hollywood movie.

But it will.

The plot has plenty of action, suspense, dramatic settings and pyrotechnics.  How could Hollywood resist?

The book has more than the average number of twists and turns that populate suspense/action novels.  The story centers on the discovery of a meteorite, buried for thousands of years under polar ice. This meteorite turns out to be rather special in that it contains fossils which prove, beyond doubt, that not only does life exist elsewhere in the universe, but strongly suggests that life on earth was seeded by just such meteorites.  Needless to say, this is huge news and just happens to occur in the middle of a contentious campaign for the U.S. Presidency.  The current President, who is in trouble in the polls, latches upon this discovery to boost both his popularity and NASA’s, the agency that discovered the meteorite.  To certify the validity of the discovery, the President assembles a team of 5 civilians to review the data. One just happens to be the estranged daughter of his opponent, who holds a senior position as an analyst with the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO), an agency with the mission statement “enabling U.S. global information superiority, during peace and through war.” Part of her job is to interpret classified data and to brief the President and other White House staff.  In this role, the President sends her to the arctic to get her take on whether the discovery is, indeed, real.

It is, she tells the White House.

But no sooner had she briefed the staff at the White House than doubt about the discovery starts to creep in.  Before she can take back her certification, she is running for her life, pursued by Delta Force soldiers.  Something is very, very wrong here.

Well, it won’t spoil the plot to tell you it is all a huge fraud, but the fun is in who concocted the plot, how it managed to fool the best scientists on the planet and what the motive was.

The first 100 pages are a bit slow and it isn’t clear where the story is headed for a while, but once the fraud starts to unravel the action picks up and never lets up.  The final 450 pages are can’t-put-it-down fun.

9 out of 10.

St Martin’s Press, 2010

This is one of a series featuring Bennie Rosato, head of an all-female law firm in Philadelphia. Most books in this series are mysteries, with a strong cast of characters and a lot of time spent on romantic and family relationships, sometimes at the expense of the mystery. But, overall, I find the books enjoyable because the characters are robust and the romantic and family dramas are interesting. This one, Think Twice, is a bit unusual in that there really isn’t a mystery.  It probably should be classified as suspense.

The plot, basically, is that Bennie’s identical twin – an evil doppelganger named Alice Connelly – tries to kill Bennie, assume her identity for a few days and steal all her assets – over 3 million dollars. She, of course, almost gets away with it, but not quite.

I enjoyed the book, but I enjoy good mysteries more, so it being suspense rather than mystery did not elevate it in my esteem.  I also didn’t buy the way Bennie escaped being buried alive.  In a situation which should have killed her in a matter of a few hours, Bennie seems to have survived for over a day, then she had to battle a coyote to get out of her grave.  Meanwhile Alice was assuming her identity so well that no one at her office, or any of her clients, detected the substitution.  Even more unbelievable was that Bennie’s ex-boyfriend returns unexpectedly and resumes the interrupted romance, thinking that Alice is Bennie.

Finally one of the lawyers at the office begins to suspect something is amiss, but not because Alice was a dolt at law, but because a crazy woman from Italy who claimed superhuman powers identified Alice as an “evil woman.”

Lisa Scottoline is a skilled author who knows how to relate a tale. But this tale was too much of a stretch for me.

5 out of 10

Grand Central Publishing, 2012

This was my first Preston and Child book featuring Gideon Crew, a nuclear physicist on loan to the FBI.  I may have read another Preston and Child book from their Pendergast series (Jett tells me I have), but if so I can’t recall it.  Preston and Child are one of Jett’s favorite authors, so I borrowed this one after she finished it.

You can read the synopsis yourself.

The plot reminded me a bit of the kind of plot you would find in the Jack Reacher series by Lee Child (no relation?): an over-the-top, the-nation-at-risk threat, thwarted by the actions of a single man. But the Reacher plots are, somehow, believable. I had a hard time believing this one – a man on the run from 22 federal agencies, involving tens of thousand of people, yet he is able to move freely around New Mexico, drive cross-country to Maryland and pass easily through security at both Los Alamos and Fort Derrick. Yeah. Either he was really lucky or our security agencies are totally incompetent.

I was also surprised at the Indiana Jones flavor of the action. Crew goes from one life-threatening predicament to the next with barely time to catch his breath. The surprise was the Jett enjoyed this as it just doesn’t seem like a plot she would enjoy. She told me afterward that she prefers the Pendergast series, but that the Crew series was “ok”. Well, in my view “ok” is a compliment.

4 on a 10 scale.