Liars & Thieves, by Stephen Coonts

November 8, 2008 by
Filed under: book review, Fiction, International bestseller, Jake Grafton, Steven Coonts, Thriller 

(Published as Wages of Sin in the UK.) Liars & Thieves, by Stephen Coonts
Tommy Carmellini is hanging out with partner Willie the Wire when ex-girlfriend Dorsey O’Shea turns up asking favors: will Tommy break into a house and retrieve some sex tapes in which she has unwittingly participated? This is not a problem for Tommy, he does it, hands the tapes over and dismisses Dorsey from his mind.

Tommy Carmellini, the main character in Liars & Thieves, is physically big, he’s very tough and doesn’t shun violence, and he doesn’t claim to be all that smart. Women seem to find him attractive and he beds them without much emotional involvement. In Liars & Thieves, I think the number is three.

Several months later, the CIA sends him to a West Virginia safe house where Russian defector Mikhail Goncharov is being debriefed. There, Tommy stumbles into a full-blown massacre. He kills a couple of attackers, rescues a woman, beats a retreat and quickly finds himself in spy hell: out in the cold, accused, alone, hunted by friend and foe alike.

The plot is good, maybe even great. It involves double-dealing all the way from the Kremlin to the West Wing of the White House. The story in Liars & Thieves is partly based on the real-life defection of Vasili Mitrokhin, the KGB archivist who arrived in Great Britain in 1992 with six suitcases of notes from classified KGB files! This is mixed with an American presidential nomination and a few other ingredients. It is an exciting cocktail. And, as the plot snowballs, it accumulates characters both good and bad.

Liars & Thieves is a good thriller. If you like Stephen Coonts, you will like the book. However, to my mind it is not among the best by Coonts (I consider his early Jake Grafton books to be his best). But a good read even so.

You can read reviews of the other two books in Stephen Coonts’ Tommy Carmellini-series at Leserglede.com.

Order the other two Carmellini-books by Stephen Coonts from amazon US: Liars & Thieves: A Novel or The Traitor (Tommy Carmellini, Book 2).
Or, order the books in the Carmellini-series by Stephen Coonts from amazon UK: Liars & Thieves, Traitor, or The Assassin. See also, the the same author, Flight of the Intruder (Jake Grafton Novels), The Minotaur, and The Red Horseman.

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