The Disciple, by Stephen Coonts

March 3, 2010 by
Filed under: bestseller, book review, espionage, military fiction, Steven Coonts, Thriller 

Iran is weeks away from having operational nuclear weapons. Closer, in fact, than the CIA believes. It seems to have every intention of using The Disciple, by Stephen Coontsthem 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.

Links to books by Stephen Coonts at Amazon US, Amazon UK, and Amazon CAN.

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