Rome, present day: Twenty Americans are killed on an Italian bus. A special Delta team is sent in to find the guy who supplied the bomb. Paraguayan jungle, present day: a CIA operative find a grissly cache of bodies as well as a very suspicious container. All deep in the jungle.
outside Prague, late in WWII: The Nazis flooded a secret underground lab and then bomb its entrance.
Denver, present day: 2 FBI agents are doing a little moonlighting to catch this female Russian spy who is trying to get info on what secret government program is going on underneath Denver International Airport.
Croatian coast, present day: a brilliant theorectical physicist, but probably with manic-depressive disorder, takes up the invitation to create someone so big, it is beyond most people's understanding. Working in the nave of an old church, a long-dead Nazi project is resurrected.
Langley, VA, present day: a shadowy operative, Hutton, keeps his Delta team hopping from one task to the next to chase down the whereabouts of the Nazi's machine.
Ok, that's the basic setup. The Delta team is composed of four women. Hutton keeps the women hunting down clues in any number of exotic European locales all the while, expertly tying in various clues from home Paraguay and Denver. They are on the hunt for stolen electromagnetic pulse bombs that originated who knows where, but are said to be of eastern European origin.
To me, this was 2 stories. One is the basic plotting and what has to be done at the outset that despite some liberties taken regarding believabilty (the old Nazi device turn out to be a teleporter that can take me to San Diego. The thriller part of this was pretty good. Not his best, but decent, still.
Part 2 was the down time between assignments. I thought the dialogue sounded contrived and cliche. I kept waiting for the team to be sitting around a speaker phone saying, in person, "Good Morning Charlie." Between the ops they run, they sit around in evening dresses and drinking champaign all the while, wearing a glock holstered on their inner thigh, pestering each other about who needs to get laid by whom. That kind of dialogue got old by about pg 5. Really, the dialogue sounded like an early version of Charlie's Angles.
If you can get past the poor excuse for witty repartee , you might actually enjoy the plot. Tell me if you did or didn't like the dialogue. I guessing in the next book, he will have even more annoying females, shooting, and a bit of misdirection to tell his story. If he does, I'll pass.
Not sure there should ever be an Athena project as the main players in future books. Just keep Scot Harvath as the main character doing the heavy lifting and leave these Athena girls home.
East Coast Don
No comments:
Post a Comment