LIARS & THIEVES

Skirt-chasing burglar-turned-CIA black bagman Tommy Carmellini (a minor figure in Cuba, 1999) has his first solo adventure, with Coonts’s hero Rear Admiral Jake Grafton in a supporting role.

That this spin-off series debut involves the federal government, with most of its plot happening outside the Beltway, is the first of many small let-downs in an adequate but disappointing effort for fans of Coonts’s flyboy military escapades. After he effortlessly burgles a safe-deposit box to retrieve sex videos featuring his former lover, the wealthy Dorsey O’Shea, Carmellini, who normally hangs out in a lock-shop with his wise-cracking black sidekick Willie “the Wire,” is told to inspect security at a Virginia mountain CIA safehouse. He arrives in time to find the complex under assault and on fire, though he’s lucky enough to kill one assailant and rescue CIA translator Kelly Erlanger plus a suitcase full of old KGB files before the bad guys give chase. A feisty Erlanger tells him that the safehouse’s guest, former KGB archivist Mikhail Goncharov, had been spilling all kinds of insider info before the attack. Someone, obviously, wanted to shut him up. Coonts then begins one of several jarring shifts, changing from Carmellini’s flip first-person narrative to a more basic third person portraying Goncharov as he hides out in a nearby vacation home. Carmellini gets almost no sleep as bad guys try to kill everyone close to him, including his CIA boss, Willie, and O’Shea. Erlanger, Carmellini, and O’Shea now flee to the Rehoboth Beach vacation home of retired Rear Admiral Jake Grafton. It’s Grafton who’ll find out that highly placed government figures are blaming Carmellini for the attack on the safehouse—figures who fear that Goncharov’s old files might expose a long-simmering scheme to take over the country at a New York political convention.

A tired spot-the-mole Washington story, laden with too much gunplay and unconvincing twists. The flyboy thrillmeister hits a grounder.