Danel Silva: The Black Widow

The reality face of ISIS terrorism
Daniel Silva has written his latest book in the outstanding Gabriel Allon series about the reality of ISIS terrorism. While he commenced writing this book before the ISIS-inspired bombings and shootings in Paris and Brussels he is not proud of his prescience that has made him even more aware of the dangers of murderous terrorism of the Islamic State.

Gabriel Allon is again back in Israel as an art restorer, delighting in the joys of parenthood of twins with his wife Chiara, and waiting for the unwelcome call to become the head of Israel's secret intelligence service. But as that time approaches events lure him back into the field when ISIS detonates a massive bomb in the Marais district of Paris devastating a Jewish centre and killing its principal Hannah Weinberg who was one of the key characters in "The Messenger". Once again Gabriel gets pulled into working with intelligence services throughout the world, even from Jordan, to defeat such evil.

The name of that evil calls himself "Saladin" after the 12th-century sultan who created a caliphate across the Middle East and Egypt. He is elusive and dangerous and will certainly strike again. Allon plans to insert an agent into his network, and again it will be a beautiful woman. At Gabriel's behest,  a young French/Israeli doctor, Natalie Mizrahi takes on a brave and dangerous role acting as a radicalised Moslem woman - a black widow who is looking for vengeance - to flush out "Saladin". Her role takes her from Paris to Syria to meet "Saladin" face to face and eventually to the US as a key part of his planned night of terror which could change the face of the world.

Silva takes us into the world of ISIS, its beliefs and brutal ways of life. He draws a chilling picture of "Saladin", a creation of radical Islam who is also a creation of recent events in the Middle East. He draws a picture of what can happen and actually did happen recently in Paris and other places.

This is another brilliant exciting and adrenaline packed thriller by Daniel Silva. I only wish that the topic was not so contemporary or chilling.

Daniel Silva: The Unlikely Spy

Deception, Deception, Deception
I have read all of Silva's Gabriel Allon series but this is the first time I have read his debut novel about espionage and deception during the latter stages of WWII. Ken Follett covered a similar theme in "Eye of the Needle" and Jack Higgins in "Night of the Fox". Both of those books were brilliant but on balance, I think that "The Unlikely Spy" is the best.

We all know now that the Allied Forces were able to successfully confuse the D-Day landing location from Hitler. Thousands of deaths were possibly saved because Hitler concentrated his defensive forces around Calais and left the Normandy coast comparatively lightly defended. There are many stories of how British intelligence helped Hitler to choose the wrong invasion point - this is a brilliant fictional story of how this happened.

The main character is Alfred Vicary, a Professor of History who is drafted by an old friend, Winston Churchill to join MI5. Vicary takes to espionage like a duck to water following Churchill's adage that in war "truth is so precious that she should always be attended by a bodyguard of lies." Vicary has tracked down most German spies, imprisoned them and continues to send deceptive messages back to Germany. But he hasn't tracked down a handful of "sleeper" operatives sent over before the war by Kurt Vogel, one of Admiral Canaris's top spymasters.

One of these operatives is Catherine Blake, a beautiful ruthless psychopathic assassin, and spy, who remains inactive in London until a key part of the war - the preparations for the D-Day landings. Her assignment is to become romantically involved with Peter Jordan, an American engineer working on a top-secret D-Day project and report back on where the landings will take place.

There follows a tale of deception on a grand scale both with the spies and within MI5. Silva writes a masterly plot with fascinating characters on both sides of the action-packed battle. While some of the deceptions fail, the ultimate deception is not known until the very last pages. This is definitely a 5-star espionage story.

This is a wonderful debut novel written in 1996 by an author who has gone on to become a world-renowned best-selling author with his Gavriel Allon series about an Israeli art restorer, spy, and assassin. I look forward to reading the next book in this brilliant series, "The Black Widow", in the next few days.

Catherine Ryan Hyde: Take Me With You

Heartwarming and emotional story
Every now and again I come across a story that will remain in my memory for a long time. It is heartwarming, emotional, and will make you laugh and cry.

August is a divorced high school science teacher who has lost his 19 year old son Phillip in a car accident. He is still grieving and as an alcoholic hasn't had a drink since his son's death. He plans a very special and personal summer tour of the main national parks of the US. A small plastic bottle in the glove box contains some of Phillip's ashes which he will scatter at key places during the tour.

His RV breaks down in a very small desert town and he is forced to rely on a small repair shop run by Wes (who is also an alcoholic). He is almost desperate because the cost of the repairs could force him to cancel the trip. When the vehicle is repaired Wes offers to waive the cost of the repairs if August takes his two boys on the tour. Wes is about to spend the summer in jail after several DUI convictions and the boys would otherwise spend the time in State care.

August reluctantly agrees to take the boys, 12-year-old Seth, and 7-year-old Henry, with him on the tour. At the start, his small part–Jack Russell terrier, Woody, is the only one delighted with the deal. Seth is a bright and motivated young boy who is excited at everything he sees. He is devoted to his younger emotionally disturbed brother who hasn't spoken for some years.

There follows a heartwarming story that grabs your attention and emotions as the two boys and August get to know one another and explore the wonders of the Western National Parks. They help August to cope with his grief as they develop a personal attachment to him which is far greater than the one to their father.

The main characters in this book will remain with you for a long time. August is always honest and frank with the two boys about his alcoholism and his loneliness. Seth is forever enthusiastic and caring for his younger brother. Henry slowly gains confidence and starts to speak again. The boys' relationship with their father doesn't improve as he lies to them again and again.

As an Aussie, one of the highlights of my world travels has been visiting the wonderful national parks in western USA. This book brought back so many memories of these unique places which the author describes so brilliantly.

I listened to this book as an audiobook, brilliantly narrated by Jeff Cummings. I highly recommend this book and will definitely read other books by this author. This was definitely 5 star material.

Ward Larsen: Assassin's Silence

Another very good contemporary espionage thriller
David Slaton was a Kidon (Assassin) with Mossad. At the end of the previous book, Assassin's Game, he no longer exists. His wife Christine told him "If you kill this man in Geneva .... don't ever come back to me" - and he didn't. She now believes he is dead and is bringing up his son in DC as a single parent.

Slaton is well and truly alive and working (and hiding) in Malta as a stone mason. Unexpectedly an assault team attacks him but Slaton is able to kill one of them and escape. In the process he identifies the leader as someone he worked with in Mossad.

On the run, Slaton manages to get to Italy and Switzerland where he has a contact who will give him the financial independence to hunt down the assault team. The team gets to Zurich shortly after he sees his contact and Slaton again narrowly escapes with his life, but only after killing more of the team. As his funds become compromised it becomes increasingly apparent to him that the team is trying to implicate him in a serious plot. Because he is concerned that they may also be targeting Christine, he arranges for an old Mossad colleague to give her protection.

Halfway around the world at a remote airfield in the Amazon, another drama is unfolding where an unknown air cargo company purchases an almost derelict jet cargo plane. A team of mechanics is flown in to make it airworthy but on the first flight the plane dives out of control toward the ocean and wreckage, an oil slick and a body of one of the passengers are found.

Ward Larson's other major fictional character, investigator Jammer Davis, believes that the plane hasn't crashed. The worst scenario soon becomes apparent when it becomes clear that the plane is still flying and has the capability of being used for an act of pure terror.

While this book started a bit slowly for me it quickly developed into an action-packed contemporary espionage thriller, with two or three different plots coming together. The action spans the world and finishes up with a nail-biting finale.

 Anyone who read The Perfect Assassin will really appreciate the epilogue.

David Baldacci: Absolute Power

An oldie but a goodie
During the drought season of new releases at the beginning of the calendar year I am revisiting a number of best-selling books that I had read many years ago. ABSOLUTE POWER is the first book that David Baldacci released in 1996 which immediately became a best-seller. It is still a pretty good and somewhat different thriller.

Luther Whitney has had a long-term career as a successful jewel thief and only burgles houses of the rich who can afford the loss. For some time, he has carefully planned a break-in to the house of a mega-rich man who has given his much younger beautiful trophy wife a lot of very expensive jewellery.  Luther knows that the owners plan to be away. The break-in goes well and he quickly overcomes the hi-tech security system. In the main bedroom, he stumbles on a walk-in safe with a mirror door which stores the wife's jewellery. Suddenly he hears several cars arriving and quickly hides in the cupboard which is big enough to have an easy chair. Imagine his surprise when he finds that the mirror is transparent and he can see everything happening in the bedroom but they can't see him.

Luther then sees the beautiful wife about to make love to an older, and familiar looking man. Their lovemaking gets violent and the man gets angry and tries to strangle the woman. In self-preservation, she stabs the man with a letter opener. His security detail rush into the room and shoot and kill her. The man passes out with too much alcohol. A woman comes into the room and takes charge as the security men clean up the room of any clues to the killer - fingerprints, vacuuming carpets and even digging out one of the bullets from the wall.

No one is aware that Luther has seen all of the action. He is scared stiff because he recognised that the man is the US President, the second woman his Chief of Staff and the security men are Secret Service. The story kicks along when Luther decides that he needs to tell someone about what actually happened, but at the same time protect himself from danger.

Baldacci has written a very different fictional thriller about the US President and the corruption of power. The plot has many twists and turns, some of the in the unbelievable category, but overall it was a compelling and entertaining piece of fiction.

Pat Conroy: Prince of Authors

It was with great sadness that I learnt of the passing of Pat Conroy, who I considered was America's Prince of Authors. 

What always impressed me was Conroy's love for the scenic marshlands of coastal South Carolina. As an Aussie I have never been to SC but Conroy made sure that it is top of my list of places to visit. Conroy lived in Beaufort, SC because 'it's too beautiful to leave'. 

Some people considered Conroy's prose too flowery but I loved its lyrical and almost poetic style. 

To describe our growing up in the low country of South Carolina, I would have to take you to the marsh on a spring day, flush the great blue heron from its silent occupation, scatter marsh hens as we sink to our knees in mud, open an oyster with a pocketknife and feed it to you from the shell and say, 'There. That taste. That's the taste of my childhood.' 

Pat Conroy had a tortured family life which was an unending source of inspiration for his fiction, notably the novels “The Great Santini,” “The Lords of Discipline” and “The Prince of Tides”. He said:

One of the greatest gifts you can get as a writer is to be born into an unhappy family.

Recently I revisited Prince of Tides as an Audiobook narrated brilliantly by the late Frank Muller. In his introduction to the audiobook, Pat Conroy said that Muller "gave me ... a work of art". I strongly recommend that narration which turned a really great book into a minor masterpiece.

Another Conroy quote that I will always remember was:

Without music, life is a journey through a desert.

Conroy died of pancreatic cancer at the age of 70. I hope that he will be able to enjoy Beach Music wherever he is.

Julie Thomas: Rachel's Legacy

The Secrets of the Letters
One day art historian Dr Kobi Voight from Melbourne is given a set of letters by his mother who had come to Australia with her German parents in the late 1940's. The letters, written in Hebrew and filled with beautiful sketches, are the reflections of a young Jewish woman to her young baby in 1942. His mother thought that they were old papers which her mother had acquired during her long life - but they are a key that unlocks the past for Kobi and eventually his mother.

The letters are a young mother's personal messages to her baby who she gave away to a German couple to save her baby's life. The author, who called herself "Ruby" was part of a resistance circle, the Red Orchestra, that worked to undermine Hitler's Germany. For protection, she made up names for her friends and her family, many of whom had been killed or sent to concentration camps. The letters stopped in 1942 when the resistance circle was broken by the Nazis. Ruby's fate was unknown.

While looking for a priceless piece of art by German Renaissance master artist Albrecht Dürer, Kobi finds a link to its ownership by the Horowitz family who we already know from KEEPER OF SECRETS. The journey of discovery will take Kobi to Germany and the US. It will expose him to the horrors of Nazi Germany and the Holocaust, through to the present day and will eventually unravel the secrets of the letters.

When I read KEEPER OF SECRETS I didn't foreshadow a sequel, nor, at first, did the author. However, in her extensive research for the earlier novel Julie Thomas learned a lot about the Red Orchestra, a very brave resistance and spy organisation that worried the Nazis. Using that information and weaving it around the Horowitz family Thomas has written another notable, sometimes harrowing and often emotional  tale. If you enjoyed the earlier book you will certainly enjoy this one. 4.5 stars.

John A Heldt: The Mine

Interesting and tender time-travel tale
I am a bit of a sucker for the fantasy of time-travel tales. It is interesting to see the different time vortexes (eg jumping off the Brooklyn Bridge, using a special watch, and walking down special steps at the right time etc.), the different reactions to moving to another time period and the problems of whether to return home (if they can), and should they do things that might affect the course of history. With THE MINE John Heldt has started off a series of time-travel tales that are well written, and cleverly plotted to make the most of this fantasy genre.

In 2000 Joel Smith is a confident and adventurous college senior with no worries in the world. One day during a trip to Montana he sees a TV news item about a very rare significant planetary conjunction.  Soon after, following his keen interest in geology he breaks into a boarded-up abandoned mine, passes through a glowing passageway and when he comes out he finds himself in mid-1941, a time only a few months away from Pearl Harbour in days of swing music and a peacetime draft in anticipation of war.

After the initial shock of finding himself in the past, Joel quickly finds his way back to his hometown of Seattle by jumping a freight train. Down on his luck with no money, hungry and tired he helps an apparently rich young man, Tom, from being mugged. Tom takes him home and lets him live in a trailer in the garden. He also introduces him to his girlfriend Ginnie a lovely free-spirited young girl of 21. How would you react to meeting your beloved Grandmother in her youth?

Joel slowly settles down to life in the 1940's, becomes a star salesman in Tom's father's furniture store and makes a lot of money carefully betting on sporting events where he knows the outcome. He makes many friends, especially among Ginnie's circle of beautiful independent-minded young females. Then Joel meets Grace..... But then Pearl Harbour is just around the corner and the rare confluence of planets is about to happen again that may give him a chance to go back to where he belongs.

John Heldt is a great storyteller and seems to have had a lot of fun putting together a bunch of great characters in an unusual setting. I thoroughly enjoyed this fairly short, well-written, entertaining tale with frequently tender (but not explicit) relationships. I see that he has written 5 books in this series and look forward to joining Heldt's other time travellers in their adventures. 4.5 stars.

Barry Lancet: Pacific Burn: A Thriller (A Jim Brodie Thriller)

Lancet's cross-cultural thrillers keep getting better
This is #3 in Barry Lancet's series featuring Jim Brodie, born in Japan to American parents, who went to Japanese schools and integrated Japanese society as well as a foreigner can. He has a great expertise in Japanese culture, history, and martial arts and shares his time as a dealer in Japanese art and antiques in San Francisco with running his late father's Tokyo-based private investigation firm.

Brodie is asked by a friend in the SFPD to help out at a murder scene in the Napa Valley to translate for a very frightened eight-year-old Japanese boy who saw his father murdered outside a major cultural centre in Napa. Brodie knows the victim because he is the son of renowned Japanese ceramic artist Ken Nobuki. With the help of a talented police artist, the young child is able to create a realistic sketch of the killer.

A few days later Brodie leaves City Hall with Ken Nobuki when a sniper attacks them from the top of the Asian Art Museum. Nobuki is hit in the head and left in a near-death induced coma in hospital. Then Nobuki's daughter Naomi, a journalist with a long term fixation on the "nuclear mafia" protecting SEPCO the owner of the damaged Fukushima nuclear power station, comes into the killer's sights.

When Brodie travels to Tokyo he finds that he is also targeted by the killer and it becomes clear that there is a contract out on the Tobuki's and on Brodie. It is not clear if the contract has been taken out by the nuclear mafia or if there is a more personal connection. The Japanese assassin, nicknamed the "Steam Walker", has an unblemished record and martial arts skills to overcome even those of Jim Brodie.

This is a fairly short but very fast moving thriller, moving from the US to Japan and showcasing Lancet's deep understanding of Japanese life and culture. I was impressed by the short chapters which increased the pace of the action.

Tokyo Kill was better than the debut novel Japantown and this one goes a step further to enhance Lancet's undoubted skills as a writer of cross-cultural thrillers. It once again centres on many aspects of  Japanese culture and behaviours. My only reservation was that I did get a bit lost with some of the US security connections, plus the need for Brodie to once again to use Japenese mythology to give the tale more authenticity. It was a short, well-written and fast-paced page-turning thriller with a difference. 4.5 stars.

My thanks to the publisher for a copy of this book for review.

Stephen Coonts: The Art of War

One of the best Grafton/Carmellini adventures
Stephen Coonts has written many military/political suspense thrillers featuring Jake Grafton and his sidekick Tommy Carmellini. When I read the synopsis I thought that Coonts had taken this series too far, but I was very wrong as he manages to make an otherwise unbelievable plot almost believable and authentic and has the two main characters chasing down the Chinese dragon threatening the doors of the US.

The basics of the plot are that the Chinese, with a small navy, want to be able to dominate the South China Sea but this will never happen with the predominant naval strength of the US. The scenario has the Chinese smuggling a nuclear weapon underwater into the midst of the largest naval base in the US in Norfolk, Virginia, with plans to destroy much of the US fleet when all nuclear aircraft carriers are scheduled to be in port during December. This would be another Pearl Harbour which will leave the US without world naval power for years. The Chinese hope that the explosion would be blamed on a nuclear bomb accident on board one of the carriers.

As the Chinese plans unfold, at the same time there are a series of assassinations of key US security officials, starting with the head of the CIA. While he is not next in line, the President chooses Jack Grafton to be interim head of the CIA. Grafton loses no time in starting to track down the killer and soon realises that he could become a target himself and gets his pit-bull, Tommy Carmellini, to handle his security. Things go from bad to worse when Air Force One is taken down by an EMP on a drone. At first, the Russians are implicated in the attack and Tommy is sent off to make contact with a Russian contact to find the truth.

All in all, this is a closely plotted thriller that seems to defy believability but has sufficient potential authenticity to overcome my worries about reading outlandish thrillers. Grafton and Carmellini shine again but never get close. Carmellini is still one of the best operatives in this kind of action-packed thriller, and this time the action gets very much up close and personal for him. Grafton is always cool and collected and is able to work well with the various security agencies and the White House to get things done.

One of the key elements of  Coonts' writing is his ability to write about the administration of government without getting involved in political issues as many other authors of this kind of thriller. As usual, Coonts includes some nail-biting military action which is a signature of most of this series. Other best-selling authors have covered similar ground with nuclear weapons being smuggled into the US by the Russians and Islamic terrorists but this is the first time I have seen the Chinese involved.

All in all, I really enjoyed this page-turning and adrenaline churning thriller and recommend it to anyone who is a fan of this kind of genre. 4.5 stars.