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BY ORDER OF THE PRESIDENT by W.E.B. Griffin

BY ORDER OF THE PRESIDENT

by W.E.B. Griffin

Pub Date: Jan. 2nd, 2005
ISBN: 0-399-15207-5
Publisher: Putnam

Griffin’s 35th title abandons his five ongoing series, perhaps the best being his Marine Corps series (Retreat, Hell!, 2004, etc.), which, with a thousand pages published so far, is still mired down in the first year of the Korean War.

Griffin is either a very, very fast typist or has a factory going. Suggesting the latter is Final Justice, last year’s entry in Griffin’s Philadelphia police procedurals that shocked many fans with its glare of inconsistencies that jarred with earlier entries. Now he kicks off still another ongoing series, this one set in 2005 to take advantage of the nation’s deepening climate of terror since 9/11. Things begin with a Boeing 727, registered to a Philadelphia firm, being hijacked in Angola and then disappearing from the radar. Where is the plane now, and for what awful purpose has it been hijacked? Griffin’s new hero is Delta Force Major Carlos Guillermo Castillo, or “Charley,” an Army intelligence officer and special assistant to the Office of Homeland Security. So it’s off to Africa for Charley, where he uncovers a disaster of huge size aborning. Meanwhile, Griffin zippers each paragraph with a polymath’s grip on a universe of photo-realistic facts about whatever he happens to see wherever his head turns. Typical Griffinesque sentence: “Two-two-zero-five Tyson Avenue was a neat brick three-story house just about in the middle of the block.”

A bedtime book for Arnold’s Terminator to enjoy.