Author: John Altman
Publisher: Severn House
Rating: WARTY!
This one annoyed me in the second sentence, where I read, "To anyone watching, she would look like an average young woman of nineteen or twenty, perhaps a bit prettier than most...". I had two issues there. If she was prettier than most, then certainly she wasn't average, but what actually bothered me was this "prettier than". Why? Why is it necessary to make this woman prettier than most? Why is this shallow, skin-depth assessment so vitally important to authors when dealing with female characters?
The front cover describes this as a "riveting espionage thriller", but even by grandiose publisher standards, that doesn't even begin to describe this novel It's superficially espionage, but it's neither riveting nor thrilling. At best, the blurb writer is batting a .333.
Superficially, the story is supposed to be about CIA assassin Cassie Bradbury, who was set up to kill a defector in Russia before being abandoned by her agency. This is the reason I picked-up the book, but as usual, the blurb lied. It's not really about Cassie, although she does make a few cameo appearances in this story. It's really about supposedly disgraced ex-CIA agent Sean Ravensdale and how he 'undisgraces' himself when turned loose in pursuit of this supposed rogue agent.
This business of having a retired agent brought back in to do something no one else purportedly can is nonsensical, but it's what we have to deal with here, and the story checks off pretty much every cliché in the book: Disgraced, retired, disaffected agent, check, check and check. Has old contacts inside the Soviet Union, er Russia? Check. The guy is in a poor relationship? Check! Ravensdale is a single dad, who, though retired and disgraced nevertheless doesn't think twice about sucking up to the very agency that treated him like dirt, abandoning his kid, and taking off to some dangerous pursuit where he might die. Some dad, huh? I sure didn't like him and wasn't interested in him.
The problem for me is that this was neither riveting nor thrilling, which is why I gave up after reading just over a quarter of the story. Life is too short to spend any more time on a novel than that if it isn't doing it for you, especially when there are scores of other novels out there begging to be read, many of which actually are going to be thrilling and riveting, I have no doubt.
The bottom line is that this one was boring for me. There was nothing interesting happening, and what did happen was tedious and repetitive. The entire story of Cassie, in the portion I read, was of her running and hiding, and hiding and running - all the time.
Ravensdale was doing much better, hanging out with old cold war contacts, drinking cognac and vodka, and seemingly making no effort to actually find this supposedly rogue agent. There was no urgency to his actions or to the endless leisurely descriptions of the faded glory of tsarist Russia. I had to quit this and move on. The novel is baroque and badly in need of a Renaissance.
