The Riviera Contract

I decided to check out author Arthur Kerns who has written three books built around the character of Hayden Stone, a former FBI guy who now has a sort of informal and ad hoc role with the CIA. I’ve finished the first two books, The Riviera Contract and The African Contract. Both stories were classic international espionage stories. In The Riviera Contract, terrorists are trying to smuggle a deadly virus into the U.S. to kill many more people than died on 9/11. In The African Contract, more terrorists are in the process of acquiring a misplaced and leaking atomic bomb from South Africa. As indicated by the titles, the action in the first takes place in the south of France, and the second takes place between Cameroon and South Africa. The protagonist, Stone, is an experienced and most resourceful agent who is difficult to control by his handlers. In the first book, the reader is introduced to one of his old flames, the beautiful and wealthy Contessa Lucinda Avoscani. She pops up in the second book to, and despite Stone having nearly destroyed her castle in the first book, she suddenly propositions him to come back from Africa to France to live with her forever. At the end of book two, after a month of living with the Contessa, Stone succumbs to an offer to return to the espionage action that he misses, and that leads to book number three.

To cut to the chase, you’ve read these stories before, and that may be what left me short of raving about Kerns efforts. The stories are good and well told, but I didn’t find anything to really distinguish the plots from other similar stories. Stone and the Contessa are interesting, but I felt there was something missing in the character development. I already have Kerns’ third book, The Yemen Contract, and I will probably get to it after a pick off a couple other books in my long reading queue.