HONG KONG

It’s the near future, and China’s grip on Hong Kong goes slack—not unlike Coonts’s latest.

Virgil “Tiger” Cole, ex-navy pilot, is currently US consul general in the Orient’s most glamorous city. He’s also extremely rich, having built a small software company into a multinational giant. But the feds think he’s been doing some unsettling things with his money. Actually, a whole lot of his behavior has been unsettling, which is why Coonts’s go-anywhere hero Jake Grafton (Cuba, 1999, etc.), now a rear admiral, has his Pentagon paper-pushing interrupted for a special CIA-sponsored mission. He’s posted to Hong Kong because he flew with Cole in Vietnam: in fact, it was Jake who hung that colorful nickname on the then bombardier-navigator. More to the point, of course, he once saved Cole’s life. Though the two haven’t been in recent contact, the hope is that Cole will remember Jake fondly, be more forthcoming with him than he would be with others. And, under ordinary circumstances, it might well have worked out that way. The problem is that Cole’s financial and ideological connection to certain Hong Kong insurgents is complex indeed. Secrets and lies are thus inevitable. Before Jake can get a real sense of how hot a political pot he’s been dropped into, his wife Callie is kidnapped, along with a pivotal anti-Communist leader. Mean-spirited wiseguy Sonny Wong has bagged them, big-eyed at the prospect of their ransom potential. Bad mistake. They don’t come more mean-spirited than Jake Grafton when his blood is up, and nothing stops him—not man, nor beast, nor an assault team of the smartest, deadliest robots ever to be programmed for genre fiction.

High-tech gimmickry, kitchen-sink plotting, stick-figure characters. For devoted fans only.