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DEEP LIE by Stuart Woods

DEEP LIE

By

Pub Date: Feb. 24th, 1985
Publisher: Norton

Woods (Chiefs, 1981) moves into the international suspense field with this lumbering and implausible Ludlumesque thriller. The Soviets are preparing to invade Sweden--yes, Sweden--and only one person in the entire world can stop them: Kate Rule, a divorc‚e working for the CIA. Rule is intelligent, attractive and deadly, right down to her Quantico attack training, her Georgetown address and her BMW 3201. The Soviets, she discovers, are going to invade Sweden with their SPETSNAZ super-commando troops under the command of KGB Colonel Majorov, who behaves like a Nazi in a WW II thriller most of the time. The reason for all this? A misguided CIA disinformation campaign to convince Moscow that Sweden was about to join NATO and, as Soviet intelligence analyst Rule puts it: "". . .because they can get away with it."" Enter Rule's boyfriend, Will Lee, a senatorial aide, who just happens to be piloting a sailboat across the Baltic at the same time as the Soviet invasion is being prepared. Lee also happens to run the sailboat aground at the SPETSNAZ training school on the coast of Latvia, where he also happens to collect an important stowaway, an Italian computer expert named Appicella, who works for the Soviets and who just happens to know the whole story of the invasion. There's also a small atomic bomb in the waters off Stockholm and a Soviet mole at CIA headquarters, but neither one has any measurable effect on the predictable outcome. The Swedes are alerted in the nick of time, the Soviets are thwarted in their globe-conquering aspirations, Rule triumphs, and her boyfriend decides to become a US Senator. And the reader is left with a numbing sense of d‚j… vu.