Investigative reporter Jake Boxer and his crew are digging around in nowhere, Russia for information about some bizarre humming sound emanating from a former Soviet military compound. Causes headaches, nausea, migraines, and more but no will acknowledge it. His sound guy tries to sneak into the compound to record the humming but gets caught. Jake is eventually called to come to Moscow and identify a body. His sound man. Claire O’Donnell, his producer, and fiancé of the dead sound engineer, nearly goes off the deep end.
Jake is a mess. In his rush to judgment, he accused Putin of following him and everyone with an umbrella filled with poison in the point for just him. His paranoia caused him to meltdown on camera getting him fired. The biggest online investigative show, Bullseye, was now defunct.
Fast forward three years. In the intervening time, Jake has tried therapy, medication, and any number of alternative treatments for his raging paranoia. About the only good thing to happen is that Jake and Claire became an item, engaged, and decided to honeymoon at a fabulous ski resort in Alaska. Claire has jettisoned investigative journalism in favor of becoming a travel writer of note. The honeymoon will be a bit of a working holiday for her.
One of his bigger stories before Jake’s meltdown was that of this guy convicted of murder in Texas. The guy never said he didn’t do it, just that he was on a CIA assignment. Texas didn’t like that and put him on death row. While on their honeymoon, they receive a text saying the guy had been put to death. Last words were ‘The good spy dies twice.’
While at this spectacular resort, Claire is off doing interviews for her assignment. Jake is still nutty with paranoia and is sure she is seeing someone else up there. As he chases her around town, he manages to almost catch up with her as she heads up the mountain on the ski lift. He gets on a few chairs behind Claire, who is riding up the hill with some guy who works in the records department of the town. During the ride up, an insignificant bolt shears off, the lift cable suddenly loosens tossing lift riders off their chairs. Dozens are hurt and two are killed - Claire and her partner on the lift. Jake has a few lumbar vertebrae fractured and he is practically chained to a wheelchair.
An accident. That’s the official line. Jake's uncontrolled paranoia goes fully into high gear. But he also returns to the madness that made him the toughest investigative reporter on the planet. So while everyone in town is a potential suspect, he also unearths connections back to when the mountain was part of the early warning net back in the Cold War days as well as a link to the recently executed CIA operative in Texas.
This is the first entry into the Jake Boxer series. I had a bit of a hard time getting into the story because Jake’s paranoia was just so much that I grew increasingly tired of it. The guy was a basket case and he just wasn’t interesting to me. But once I got about a third of the way into the book, the story picked up when Jake pushed his paranoia into the dark and allowed his investigative chops take over. From then on, the story became more pretty dang entertaining. Glad I stayed with it because there were plenty of opportunities to put it away. Overall, pretty good. Maybe I’ll come back to Jake Boxer? Hard to say. We shall see.
No comments:
Post a Comment