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ORACLE

An often engrossing spy novel on an international scale.

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Rainer offers the eighth continent-spanning installment in his Jeff Trask thriller series, in which the hero must help avert a plan for nuclear armageddon.

In 2021, CIA agent “Buck” Buckley is mere months into a new posting in Athens, Greece, when Yuri Mikhail Gilfoy, a senior Mossad official from Tel Aviv, appears. Yuri hasn’t left his office to catch up with an old friend. Instead, he warns Buck about recent intel he’s received from an anonymous source, nicknamed “Oracle,” regarding a possible nuclear attack. The Supreme Leader of the Islamic Republic of Iran, it appears, aims to take retaliatory measures following the signing of the Abraham Accords in 2020, in which several Arabic nations recognized the state of Israel and agreed to normalize relations. Yuri’s source has suggested that Athens, the “original cradle of Western civilization and democracy,” represents a likely target. Shortly after delivering this jaw-dropping news, Yuri departs, leaving Buck and his colleagues at the U.S. embassy to brace for any possibility. Meanwhile, in Tehran, a former champion wrestler-turned-colonel of the Iran Revolutionary Guards, Ahmed Jafari, plays games of Football Megastars online and keeps his head down as the Supreme Leader speculates about a mole in his office. Back in Kansas City, Missouri, Assistant U.S. Attorney Jeff Trask and his wife, Lynn, prepare for a long-awaited vacation to Greece—where they become entangled in Rainer’s serpentine narrative. Over the course of this espionage thriller, the author ably weaves together the various threads of his capacious and complex international doomsday narrative. Some readers may be surprised that the chief player is not Trask; indeed, it isn’t any one character, but more of an ensemble piece, and the action moves too fast for any real interior character development. However, the author’s sleek, propulsive prose effectively drives readers toward a promised climax. Some bits of dialogue feel a bit clichéd, but for this, Rainer can be forgiven, as the book is clearly written in the spirit of good, gripping fun. In this sense, it’s successful—explosively so.

An often engrossing spy novel on an international scale.

Pub Date: Nov. 8, 2023

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: 253

Publisher: manuscript

Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2023

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2023

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TOM CLANCY ACT OF DEFIANCE

Well-paced excitement as the Ryans come through again.

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Echoes of Tom Clancy’s The Hunt for Red October reverberate four decades after the late author’s famous debut.

In 1984, Dimitri Gorov plans to deliver details of the advanced Soviet submarine Red October to the Americans, but Marko Ramius has already defected and delivered the boat itself. Gorov dies and now, decades later, his son Konstantin captains the Belgorod, Russia’s most advanced sub. Said sub goes rogue along with its nuclear-tipped torpedoes that can penetrate American defenses and blow up some of our coastal cities, or “wipe the American Atlantic fleet off the map.” Driven by multiple grievances, Konstantin wants to do just that, but a painful illness may bring him down. Meanwhile, young Navy lieutenant Kathleen (Katie, please) Ryan plays one of several key roles in trying to stop World War III. She’s smart and appealing and tries hard to downplay the fact that she’s President Jack Ryan’s daughter—“Daddy’s little girl,” as a snarky officer says to her face. In one nail-biting scene a helicopter tries to transfer her from a ship to a submarine in the open ocean. As with every novel in the series, readers are treated to a ton of technical details and asides that slow the reading occasionally, but without which it would not be a Clancy yarn. And of course, there is the obligatory establishment of what fine all-around Americans the Ryans are. Plenty of well-crafted characters, Russian and American, make up the cast. War begins to brew as a Russian MiG is shot down and troubles threaten to escalate. At one point, Katie “felt like the entire world was barreling toward oblivion and she was the only one who could stop it.” But wait: Late in the game, Konstantin muses, “There is nothing the Americans can do to stop me.” Who is right? Hmm, that’s a tough one. In her proud father’s mind, Lieutenant Ryan becomes “Katie—my little girl turned naval officer overnight.”

Well-paced excitement as the Ryans come through again.

Pub Date: May 21, 2024

ISBN: 9780593422878

Page Count: 560

Publisher: Putnam

Review Posted Online: March 9, 2024

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2024

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THE MATCHMAKER

Intrigue, murder, and vengeance make for a darkly enjoyable read.

A woman’s life takes a stunning turn and a wall comes tumbling down in this tense Cold War spy drama.

In Berlin in 1989, the wall is about to crumble, and Anne Simpson’s husband, Stefan Koehler, goes missing. She is a translator working with refugees from the communist bloc, and he is a piano tuner who travels around Europe with orchestras. Or so he claims. German intelligence service the BND and America’s CIA bring her in for questioning, wrongly thinking she’s protecting him. Soon she begins to learn more about Stefan, whom she had met in the Netherlands a few years ago. She realizes he’s a “gregarious musician with easy charm who collected friends like a beachcomber collects shells, keeping a few, discarding most.” Police find his wallet in a canal and his prized zither in nearby bushes but not his body. Has he been murdered? What’s going on? And why does the BND care? If Stefan is alive, he’s in deep trouble, because he’s believed to be working for the Stasi. She’s told “the dead have a way of showing up. It is only the living who hide.” And she’s quite believable when she wonders, “Can you grieve for someone who betrayed you?” Smart and observant, she notes that the reaction by one of her interrogators is “as false as his toupee. Obvious, uncalled for, and easily put on.” Lurking behind the scenes is the Matchmaker, who specializes in finding women—“American. Divorced. Unhappy,” and possibly having access to Western secrets—who will fall for one of his Romeos. Anne is the perfect fit. “The matchmaker turned love into tradecraft,” a CIA agent tells her. But espionage is an amoral business where duty trumps decency, and “deploring the morality of spies is like deploring violence in boxers.” It’s a sentiment John le Carré would have endorsed, but Anne may have the final word.

Intrigue, murder, and vengeance make for a darkly enjoyable read.

Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2022

ISBN: 978-1-64313-865-7

Page Count: 352

Publisher: Pegasus Crime

Review Posted Online: Jan. 11, 2022

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2022

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