An espionage novel with a sound premise that gets bogged down in minutiae.
U.S. Air Force Maj. Jake Kelly is on a mission to prevent a coup in the Soviet Union in Cobb’s fourth Falcon Series spy thriller.
It’s 1988, and Kelly, also known as “Falcon,”is getting married in San Francisco. He’s a crack pilot and a member of an elite special forces team. His bride, Galina Toporova, is a Soviet woman who saved his life during one of his missions in her home country. Guests include Kelly’s friend and mentor, CIA bigwig Bill Jensen, and Galina’s surrogate father, Anatoly Romanovich Geredin, the aging head of the KGB. It’s an odd mix, for sure, but perhaps one that speaks to an approaching thaw in the Cold War. The reformist policies of the new Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, aren’t being met with universal enthusiasm in his own country, however. A cadre of hard-liners within the Soviet military, led by Adm. Konstantin Grigoriyevich Shukshin, are plotting a coup, hoping to restore the Soviet Union to what they see as the glorious days of Stalinist rule. When Geredin gets word of the plot—which involves forcing a military skirmish between Soviet and American forces—he reaches across the Cold War battle lines to seek help from Jensen. As tensions escalate, Jensen receives permission to insert an American agent into the Soviet’s Red Banner Pacific Fleet. “I’d like to send Major Kelly back in,” Jensen explains to Vice President George H.W. Bush. “I believe he can pull off the Soviet citizen act with no difficulty.” Kelly has just lost his flight clearance after having a seizure,but he’s itching to get back into the field. Will he be able to complete the mission? The future of U.S–Soviet relations may hang in the balance.
Cobb’s novel dramatizes events leading up to a real-life attempted coup against Gorbachev, which gives it a feeling of realism that’s often missing from espionage novels. It’s clear that the author knows the ins and outs of submarine warfare, and the scenes depicting these chess matches are consistently tense and believable. That sense of verisimilitude does not extend to the characters, though, who are reliably flat and easily sorted into hero and villain categories. Even for a flyboy, Kelly is a petulant protagonist, and he comes off as too shallow and impulsive to win readers’ admiration. In addition, a Christian element runs through the story but isn’t integrated very convincingly; Jake’s superiors are regularly recruiting him to accept Christ into his life, for example, and his formerly atheistic wife, Galina, is depicted as very taken with “the words of Jesus.” The pacing is also hampered by superfluous scenes reiterating information already given or unnecessarily establishing relationships between characters, as if readers would be unable to make such connections on their own. Indeed, Cobb spends far too long setting things up in this novel, and by the time Jake is back in the U.S.S.R., many readers will likely have lost interest.
An espionage novel with a sound premise that gets bogged down in minutiae.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: 978-0-9848875-7-6
Page Count: 541
Publisher: Doorway Press
Review Posted Online: Oct. 2, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
Intrigue, murder, and vengeance make for a darkly enjoyable read.
A woman’s life takes a stunning turn and a wall comes tumbling down in this tense Cold War spy drama.
In Berlin in 1989, the wall is about to crumble, and Anne Simpson’s husband, Stefan Koehler, goes missing. She is a translator working with refugees from the communist bloc, and he is a piano tuner who travels around Europe with orchestras. Or so he claims. German intelligence service the BND and America’s CIA bring her in for questioning, wrongly thinking she’s protecting him. Soon she begins to learn more about Stefan, whom she had met in the Netherlands a few years ago. She realizes he’s a “gregarious musician with easy charm who collected friends like a beachcomber collects shells, keeping a few, discarding most.” Police find his wallet in a canal and his prized zither in nearby bushes but not his body. Has he been murdered? What’s going on? And why does the BND care? If Stefan is alive, he’s in deep trouble, because he’s believed to be working for the Stasi. She’s told “the dead have a way of showing up. It is only the living who hide.” And she’s quite believable when she wonders, “Can you grieve for someone who betrayed you?” Smart and observant, she notes that the reaction by one of her interrogators is “as false as his toupee. Obvious, uncalled for, and easily put on.” Lurking behind the scenes is the Matchmaker, who specializes in finding women—“American. Divorced. Unhappy,” and possibly having access to Western secrets—who will fall for one of his Romeos. Anne is the perfect fit. “The matchmaker turned love into tradecraft,” a CIA agent tells her. But espionage is an amoral business where duty trumps decency, and “deploring the morality of spies is like deploring violence in boxers.” It’s a sentiment John le Carré would have endorsed, but Anne may have the final word.
Intrigue, murder, and vengeance make for a darkly enjoyable read.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-64313-865-7
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Pegasus Crime
Review Posted Online: Jan. 11, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2022
Greed, love, and extrasensory abilities combine in two middling mysteries.
Coulter’s treasured FBI agents take on two cases marked by danger and personal involvement.
Dillon Savitch and his wife, Lacey Sherlock, have special abilities that have served them well in law enforcement (Paradox, 2018, etc.). But that doesn't prevent Sherlock’s car from hitting a running man after having been struck by a speeding SUV that runs a red light. The runner, though clearly injured, continues on his way and disappears. Not so the SUV driver, a security engineer for the Bexholt Group, which has ties to government agencies. Sherlock’s own concussion causes memory loss so severe that she doesn’t recognize Savitch or remember their son, Sean. The whole incident seems more suspicious when a blood test from the splatter of the man Sherlock hit reveals that he’s Justice Cummings, an analyst for the CIA. The agency’s refusal to cooperate makes Savitch certain that Bexholt is involved in a deep-laid plot. Meanwhile, Special Agent Griffin Hammersmith is visiting friends who run a cafe in the touristy Virginia town of Gaffers Ridge. Hammersmith, who has psychic abilities, is taken aback when he hears in his mind a woman’s cry for help. Reporter Carson DeSilva, who came to the area to interview a Nobel Prize winner, also has psychic abilities, and she overhears the thoughts of Rafer Bodine, a young man who has apparently kidnapped and possibly murdered three teenage girls. Unluckily, she blurts out her thoughts, and she’s snatched and tied up in a cellar by Bodine. Bodine may be a killer, but he’s also the nephew of the sheriff and the son of the local bigwig. So the sheriff arrests Hammersmith and refuses to accept his FBI credentials. Bodine's mother has psychic powers strong enough to kill, but she meets her match in Hammersmith, DeSilva, Savitch, and Sherlock.
Greed, love, and extrasensory abilities combine in two middling mysteries.Pub Date: July 30, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5011-9365-1
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: June 30, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2019
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