The Disciple, by Stephen Coonts

Iran is weeks away from having operational nuclear weapons. Closer, in fact, than the CIA believes. It seems to have every intention of using them to strike first. Iran’s president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is willing to go to great lengths to reunite the Muslim world, and has a plan. According to this plan, Iran will become a martyr nation, and Ahmadinejad will lead the united Muslims of the world in a holy war against the non-believers.

CIA’s Chief of Operations for the Middle East is former Navy admiral Jake Grafton. He knows something is going on, and assigns his best operative, Tommy Carmellini, to work inside Iran. Tommy starts gathering information, and is assisted by a group of dissident Iranians. They are afraid their leader may start a new world war.

Eventually, the facts are on the table. And they are much worse than suspected. Iran has nearly completed production of a dozen nuclear warheads. But the American President refuses to strike Iran first. As he sees it, a broad strike on Iran will be the beginning of the third world war. Instead it will be up to Grafton and Carmellini to stop the disaster from occurring. The countdown to Armageddon has started. Can it be stopped?

Tommy Carmellini, the main character in a recent series of books by Stephen Coonts, has worked with Jake Grafton on a number of missions. He is a retired jewel thief that has been turned into a somewhat reluctant CIA operative. He is a very smooth, careful, intelligent and highly adaptive man who has just the kind of skill set that is required for deep undercover work.

In The Disciple, Stephen Coonts returns to the kind of military and espionage story that he is great at, and that made some other novels, like Cuba, very successful novels. This is a good move by Coonts. He knows how to tell a suspenseful tale of skillful military action and undercover technology.

The Disciple had me pinned to my chair. It is Coonts at his best again. A great book!

The Disciple is a tense and fast-paced thriller, starting with the opening sequence of the Israeli destruction of a Syrian nuclear plant. It never slows down. A great book for fans of military and espionage thrillers.
One I recommend.

High Citadel, by Desmond Bagley

Desmond Bagley is an almost forgetten English master thriller writer. But his books are still very well worth reading – elegant, extremely suspenseful, good characters and smart plots. High Citadel is one of his best.

A plane is forced down in the Andes. The survivors – a pilot, two businessmen, an ex-president, his bodyguard and his niece, a school teacher, and two academics – are forced to battle altitude sickness, freezing temperatures, and a band of Communist guerillas.

And as they try to organize their effort to improve their situation, we start to find out that the people involved are not what they say they are. Each has their own past. And, in addition, it soon becomes evident that the survivors have a traitor in their midst.

They manage to get down to a mining camp. There another bad surprise awaits them. What follows is tense, tightly scripted action. The party of survivors gets holed up on one side of a gorge, trying their best to holding off attackers with limited weapons and ammunition and a homemade crossbow. Their hopes rest on a small number who have volunteered to climb the other side of the mountain looking for help.

Every character in High Citadel plays an important role. The action is very tense, and the suspense is present all the time. This is one of Bagley’s best books, well written, exciting and a great read. It is highly recommended for all thriller fans.

Babette’s Feast, by Isak Dinesen / Karen Blixen – DVD

• Actors: Stéphane Audran, Bodil Kjer, Birgitte Federspiel,
  Jarl Kulle, Jean-Philippe Lafont
  
• Director: Gabriel Axel
  
• Writers: Gabriel Axel, Karen Blixen
  
• Producers: Benni Korzen, Bo Christensen, Just Betzer, Pernille Siesbye
  
• Format: Closed-captioned, Color, DVD, Letterboxed, Subtitled, Widescreen, NTSC
  
• Language: French (Dolby Digital 2.0), English (Dolby Digital 1.0), Spanish (Dolby Digital 2.0 Surround), Danish (Dolby Digital 2.0 Surround)
  
• Subtitles: English, Spanish, French
  
• Region: Region 1 U.S. and Canada only.
  
• Aspect Ratio: 1.66:1
  
• Number of discs: 1
  
• Rating: G (General Audience)
  
• DVD Release Date: January 23, 2001
  
• Run Time: 102 minutes
  
• 4.7 out of 5 stars at Amazon.com

Babette’s Feast – Description

Babette’s Feast is just a marvelous, fantastic and delicious story: Artistic, sensual and full of sacred passions. In Babette’s Feast, a woman flees the French civil war and lands in a small seacoast village in Denmark, where she comes to work for two spinsters, Martina and Philippa, devout daughters of a puritan minister. Both girls sacrifice youthful passion to faith and duty, and even many years after their father’s death; they keep his austere teachings alive among the townspeople.

After many years, Babette unexpectedly wins a lottery, and decides to create a real French dinner–which leads the sisters to fear for their souls. Joining them for the meal will be a Danish general who, as a young soldier, courted one of the sisters, but she turned him away because of her religion. The village elders all resolve not to enjoy the meal, but can their moral fiber resist the sensual pleasure of Babette’s cooking? A truly outrageous French gourmet meal?

Babette’s Feast deservedly won the 1987 Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film. This lovely movie is impeccably simple, yet its slender narrative contains a wealth of humor, melancholy, and hope.

The film is written and directed by Gabriel Axel, from a short story by Out of Africa’s Isak Dinesen. This Oscar-winning film offers “an irresistible mixture of dry wit and robust humanity” (Newsweek).

Beginning HTML5 and CSS3: Next Generation Web Standards, by Christopher Murphy

This is a new and very exciting book on modern use of HTML5 and the new CSS3 techniques. If you are a web developer, then Beginning HTML5 and CSS3 is a great introduction to the new features and elements of HTML5; all the leaner, cleaner, and more efficient code you’ve hoped for is available now with HTML5. Aslo, you will find new tools that will allow you to create more meaningful and richer content. For everyone involved in web design, this book also introduces the new structural integrity and styling flexibility of CSS 3. This means better-looking pages and smarter content in your website projects with less work than before.

Beginning HTML-5 and CSS3 provides an in-depth look the new capabilities—including audio and video—that are new to web standards. It also addresses the new HTML5 structural sections, plus HTML5 and CSS3 layouts. You see how to create transitions and animations with new technologies.

• Cutting-edge web development techniques with HTML5 and CSS3
• The new features of HTML5 and how to work with HTML5 and CSS3
• The new web standards being implemented by all the major web browsers
• How to work with the new HTML5 structural sections
• How to create HTML5 and CSS3 layouts
• How to create transitions and animations without using Flash
• New web typography solutions
• A new vision of web development with HTML5 and CSS3

This book is for web developers and anyone involved in web design who wants to embrace the new web standards and cutting-edge features of HTML5 and CSS3. With a practical, accessible approach, this book is for anyone who wants to push their websites forwards with the latest technologies.

Judas Unchained, by Peter Hamilton

Set in the 24th century, bestseller Hamilton’s richly satisfying space opera is both a sequel to Pandora’s Star (2004) and the second half of one dauntingly complicated, wonderfully imagined novel. In the far future, mankind has prospered under the control of the hegemonic Commonwealth, led by the charismatic Nigel Sheldon. Part of the reason for this prosperity is the adaptation of a new wormhole technology developed by Sheldon. Wormholes are generated iteratively and used to create a series of intergalactic railway tunnels linking distant planets with a simple train network.

When Pandora’s Star ended, the worlds of the Commonwealth were under devastating attack by the alien race called Prime. The Prime are a hive-mind organism that was freed by accident from a force field that had been placed around their star by an unknown race.

In the war that followed, twenty-three inhabited Commonwealth-worlds were lost. Millions of people died and millions refugees. In Judas Unchained, we meet again the major players of the Commonwealth as they seek to come to grasp with the treath and mobilize against it. But a second enemy, another mystical alien force, is appearing on the radar of some of the actors in the plot as well – the Starflyer. The Starflyer may potentially be even more dangerous to the human race.

The Guardians, a splinter group believed to be a terrorist organization, have for a long time expressed their belief in the Starflyer’s existence. Now more and more others are being convinced that what they say is true. The Starflyer, argue the Guardians, deliberately manipulated humanity into war with the Prime, so that both species would be weakened. The Starflyer apparently has agents – humans that it controls – all over the Commonwealth.

Once again, Peter F. Hamilton proves himself capable of writing large scale space opera. In a multitude of subplots, Hamilton adroitly leaps from the struggles of one engaging, quirky character to another. Meanwhile, the main action expands and the super-scientific weapons become increasingly terrible.

Hamilton writes excellent action sequences, and his characters are interesting. For any fan of science fiction, Judas Unchained is one to read!

Lars Kepler – the pseudonym that aspires to be the next Stieg Larsson

The Hypnotist (Hypnotisören) is the latest huge crime novel in Sweden. The first novel by a new and unknown author, Lars Kepler. Big hype, huge expectations about a new series of novels featuring a new interesting heroine, Detective Inspector Joona Linna. The book was an instant best seller in Sweden. The rights to the book has been sold internationally to  more than 30 countries worldwide, including the U.S.

The plot is interesting. A father, wife and daughter are all brutally murdered as part of an attempt to wipe out an entire family. The police have to race against time to find the one surviving daughter before the killer does. The only way they can achieve this, is to convince a doctor, against his better judgment, to hypnotize the son who barely survived the killer’s attack.

Then it was revealed by the media that there is no Lars Kepler. Lars Kepler does not exist. Huge sensation. Lars Kepler turned out to be a pseudonym for two literary authors, husband-and-wife Alexandra Coelho Ahndoril and Alexander Ahndoril, now writing under the pseudonym Lars Kepler. They have so far barely been able to sustain themselves economically by their writing. Now they wanted to make money. And in Sweden, crime fiction writers make big money. And, of course, when in Sweden, do as the Swedes. So they decided to write crime fiction, using a cool name.

According to Jan Guillou, they have achieved their goal already: the book and rights have so far netted them 15-20 million SKR. Not bad. Or?

The Bourne Deception, by Eric van Lustbader, Robert Ludlum

Robert Ludlum died in March 2001, but even so new Jason Bourne novels keep coming. I consider Robert Ludlum as one of the best thriller writers ever. And the Jason Bourne books were among his best. So somebody must have decided there was a market for Jason Bourne’s adventures even after Ludlum’s death. So now follow-ups are written by author Eric Van Lustbader. Lustbader has written 20 or so more or less best-selling novels, and should be able to take on this mission.

In this book a very highly placed American makes a deal with a Russian to have Bourne killed – once more. And in exchange for this, the Americans will kill a terrorist for the Russians (a bit of a shift from the old days, when the *Russians supposedly supported terrorists?) A Russian sniper, who turns out to be Leonid Arkadin (see The Bourne Sanction) finds Jason Bourne in Bali. He shoots him, hitting him square in the chest, but somehow the very severely hurt Bourne escapes and lives.

Then the canvas widens. A US airplane is shot down over Egypt. War hawks plot for an American invasion of Iran. A rouge American security outfit with extremely greedy owners meddles with intelligence reports and kills high ranking US Government officials. The American Secretary of Defense pushes for war to increase his own standing in the government.

The plot in The Bourne Deception is rich and past paced. And there is lots of action – almost too much, in the sense that it feels a little like sitting in a roller coaster train. The plot moves along, but its underpinnings are weak and strange, the logic that drives it a little artificial, and in the midst of it all Van Lustbader – who has a metaphysical leaning – throws in a little meta-physics (something Ludlum would never have done!).

I have to say I have read the follow-ups to Ludlum’s Jason Bourne novels by Eric van Lustbader with growing frustration. More and more I experience the books as overwhelmed by movie-like action descriptions as a substitute for intelligent plots and clever dynamics. The Bourne Deception I liked even less than the previous. To my mind, these books are now moving into a territory where only for the really diehard fans of the Jason Bourne saga will enjoy them.

Dead Reckoning, by C. Northcote Parkinson

Dead Reckoning is the fourth book in the Richard Delancey  series by C. Northcote Parkinson, and a very good one at that. We have now reached the year 1805, during The Napoleonic wars. Richard Delancey has married a former actress, Fiona, and is very happy. He is made post, brought back into the service, and given command over the old 32-gun frigate Laura. He is happy to be given command. However, his orders are not exactly what he would prefer as a recently married man. He has been assigned service in the Far East. He must part from his young wife for an unknown period of time.

There is a lot of naval action in this novel. There is convoy escort, a special assignment to chase down a French privateer that disturbs trade, an attack on Mauritius, as well as a bloody fight against two French frigates. In several instances Richard Delancey shows both courage and intelligence. His ingenious strategies while escorting a convoy of East Indiamen is very entertaining. So is the demonstration of pure willpower in the attack against a French privateer.

Delancey is a creative, solid, smart and very likeable officer in Her Majesty’s Navy. Dead Reckoning is thick with excellent plots and smart thinking. It is perhaps the best in the series so far, and certainly one that increased my interest in C. Northcote Parkinson’s series! Being a fan of nautical fiction, I rank this series highly!

The Fight for Rome, by James Duffy

In this second novel in the Gladiators of the Empire series, which continues to tell the story of Quintus Honorius Romanus, the gladiator going by the name of Taurus, we meet again the key characters of James Duffy’s first novel, Sand of the Arena. We meet Quintus, Lindani and Amazonia only a few months after the events in the first book.

It is now AD 69, and it is the Year of the Four Emperors. Emperor Galba has been assassinated, and Otho is engaged in a fight against Vitellius for the throne. But Otho has too few soldiers on his side, and now gladiators are recruited as soldiers for Otho.

>At the same time, at a gladiator ludus in Africa, Quintus’ arch-enemy, the slave Lucius Calidius, gets a second chance. Julia, who is newly widowed and now sole owner of the Romanus shipping business, comes to rescue Lucius, and soon they find themselves in comfortable circumstances in Alexandria and Caesarea, courting Vespasian, the fourth contender for the Roma throne.

The Fight for Rome is a good and very entertaining novel. However, the plot is a little farfetched – as it places a gladiator in the center of the vast struggle for control over the Roman Empire. But if you accept the plot, this is a good, pretty well researched and very interesting novel. The fighting scenes seem very realistic and the relations among the characters are very interesting and well described. The Fight for Rome is a good historical fiction novel which I recommend.

>Praise:

“A well-written story of ancient Rome, comparable to novels written by Simon Scarrow and Michael Curtis Ford . . . an exciting portrayal of gladiatorial combat.”

— The Historical Novels Review

“Duffy combines a sure sense of character and narrative with an extraordinary knowledge of the world of the Roman arena. It’s an exciting, thrilling novel. I’m looking forward to more in the series.”

— John Maddox Roberts, Author,

SPQR historical fiction series

A Clash of Kings, by George R. R. Martin

In A Clash of Kings, George R. R. Martin continues to tell the titanic story of The Song Of Ice And Fire. It is as good as the previous book, if not better. And it is even grimmer and longer than the first volume.

It starts right where A Game of Thrones ends. King Robert is dead. Lord Stark’s head has parted with his shoulders. In the realm there is total chaos. Several kings vie for power, there is war everywhere.

Princess Arya Stark flees her dead father’s capital of King’s Landing, disguised as a boy. And the kingdom is now divided, with several groups wanting the Throne. Robb Stark has been appalled by the treachery of the Lannister family, and has declared himself King of the North. As well, two of the dead King’s brothers also declare for the throne and plan war.

At the same time, things are happening in the North, and it seems strange and mysterious forces are making their way into the civilized lands. Also, a young woman raises a trio of dragons and plots her revenge.

Tyrion Lannister – a very cynical and intriguing character indeed – is once again one at the centre stage in this book. Using his perspective, Martin is able to provide both humor and lots of intelligence.

Each of the three major plots is developing at great pace. And like the previous book, A Clash of Kings is full of scheming, plotting, betrayal, violence and action. The strings are masterfully held together by Martin, and the world of the Seven Kingdoms in vividly clear. Another great installment in a major saga you should not miss out on.

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