The Disciple, by Stephen Coonts
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 
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.
, 
.The Traitor, by Stephen Coonts
Filed under: book review, espionage, Jake Grafton, military fiction, Steven Coonts, Thriller
(Published as Traitor in the UK.) Here Tommy Carmellini gets a shot at the big time when he’s asked to drop his routine work and help find out why the director of French intelligence is making large, secret investments in the Bank of Palestine. 
When his controller tells him that the new head of European Ops asked for Tommy by name, it turns out to be the unretired Jake Grafton, described by Carmellini as “the toughest son of a bitch wearing shoe leather.”
With support from Grafton, Sarah Houston, and a nifty little electronic weapon (a wireless Taser) Tommy zeroes in on the high-level traitor who could do him and the world a lot of damage.
As it turns out, Al-Queda is attempting to blow up the government leaders attending a G-8 summit in Paris. Grafton’s and Carmellini’s foe is no other than Abu Qasim, a very ruthless, sinister, and cunning Al Qaeda leader!
The Traitor is packed with action and fast moving. It is a great thriller, and a good read.
, Traitor
, or The Assassin
.
See also, the the same author, Flight of the Intruder (Jake Grafton Novels)
Prince of Fire, by Daniel Silva
Filed under: book review, Daniel Silva, espionage, Fiction, Gabriel Allon, recommendation, Thriller
Prince of Fire is Daniel Silva’s fifth novel in his Gabriel Allon series. Allon is an internationally renowned art restorer, assassin, and 
In Prince of Fire terrorists bomb the Israeli embassy in Rome and massacre the people working there. And so, once more, Gabriel Allon gets a visit from the spy master of the Israeli secret service, the legendary Ari Shamron. Ari Shamron, who once was the head of Israel’s secret service and is Gabriel’s mentor, is now special advisor to Israel’s prime minister.
When Shamron visits Gabriel in Italy, he informs him that Palestinian terrorists have uncovered Gabriel’s true identity and may be targeting him for assassination. He urges Gabriel to come out of retirement. Reluctantly, as always, he returns to Israel to head a team investigating the bombing. After some difficult work, the team finds traces leading to a Palestinian mastermind named Khaled al-Khalifa. He is, as well, believed to be the brain behind two earlier terrorist attacks. Allon is now assigned to find and execute him.
As in his other books, Silva weaves facts and fiction in a rough, hard reality which is grim and requires tough decisions, especially by those involved in the espionage business. The story in Prince of Fire is, if anything, even darker than most of the stories in this series. None of the actors involved – both individuals and the organizations – are able to walk away with clean hands in this story.
Khaled al-Khalifa turns out to be perhaps the most difficult opponent Gabriel Allon has encountered so far. Both have lots of resources to back them up, and both are extremely skilled and smart.
The complex and very well told story in Prince of Fire has a lot of twists and turns, as well as false identities, double-crosses and misleading information. And the action is fast and furious: assassinations, bombings and kidnappings.
Prince of Fire is a great addition to the Gabriel Allon series. It is an excellent, very exciting spy thriller.
The Unlikely Spy, by Daniel Silva
Filed under: book review, Daniel Silva, espionage, Fiction, recommendation, Thriller
Daniel Silva is a great writer of thrillers of espionage. His writings remind me of the early John Le Carré. In this book, The Unlikely Spy, his debut novel, he looks behind the curtain of 
In The Unlikely Spy Silva deals with the Allies’ effort to protect perhaps the greatest secrets of all during World War II – the location of the planned D-Day landings in France. Silva’s story has an innovative plot with roots both in Nazi-Germany’s spy machine ran by Admiral Canaris and a huge counter-intelligence effort, involving both the American and the British intelligence services, and having been cleared all the way up to Prime Minister Winston Churchill!
The stakes on both sides are extremely high: a successful invasion does not assure victory, but defeat on the beaches will prolong the war and, very possibly, lose it. Much hinges on what the enemy knows about the undertaking. “In wartime,” Winston Churchill wrote, “truth is so precious that she should always be attended by a bodyguard of lies.”
The main story in The Unlikely Spy takes place in 1943, but with excursions to events at previous points in time leading up to the key events. In 1943, Britain’s counter-intelligence service MI5 has identified and captured virtually all of the German spies sent to the country so far. Some has been hanged; some has been turned and are used to feed back carefully crafted misinformation to their controllers in Germany.
But now the Germans awaken a sleeping agent to get more intelligence about the upcoming British invasion. And when the British learn about this, they realize that one piece of correct information may destroy the house of cards – based on endless lies – they have so carefully constructed. The sleeper-agent is Catherine Blake, a very beautiful and seductive agent who began her entry into Britain with the cold-blooded killing of a young female painter. As she comes closer and closer to penetrating the Allied operation, code-named Operation Mulberry, the action accelerates. Will the invasion plan succeed with this a brilliant agent at work? Can she be stopped in time?
Silva’s characters are strong. Along with a teeming cast of other characters, real and fictional, they bring the chase to a furious and satisfying climax. And the final plot twist is original, yet logical.
The Unlikely Spy is a strong and promising debut book.
Order Daniel Silva’s The Unlikely Spy
See more reviews of books by Daniel Silva at Leserglede.com!
A Death in Vienna, by Daniel Silva
Filed under: book review, Daniel Silva, espionage, Fiction, Gabriel Allon, International bestseller, Main character, Thriller
A Death in Vienna deals with issues surrounding the Holocaust. 
The starting point in A Death in Vienna is the bombing of the “Wartime Claims and Inquires” offices in Vienna. This is where Gabriel Allon’s friend, Eli Lavon, works. Lavon is seriously injured in the blast, and Allon is sent to find the perpetrators of this crime. The Austrian government declares the bombing to be the work of an Islamist terrorist group. However, Mossad and Allon do not buy this explanation. Allon believes it may instead have been engineered by Nazi criminals hoping to prevent Lavon from discovering their whereabouts.
The action in A Death in Vienna takes Allon from Vienna to Israel, Italy, Argentina, the US, and back to Vienna. He gradually realizes that there are complex political, financial, and national security issues that affect a number of countries, and that the story he unfolds has its beginnings back in World War II. Erich Radek, a former Nazi with links to Auschwitz and Treblinka, who is still alive and active in Vienna, plays a prominent part in this, as does Konrad Becker, a Zurich banker who has a client with over two billion dollars in assets. Also involved, it seems, is the Vatican and the American CIA who together protected selected war criminals after the war.
The case becomes personal when Allon, who reads his mother’s account of her time in the camps “I will not tell all the things I saw. I cannot. I owe this much to the dead”, discovers that not only was Radek a sadistic monster, his mother was very nearly murdered by him.
The story told by Silva in this book is a chilling tale indeed. A Death in Vienna is, like all of Daniel Silva’s books, fast-paced, compelling, and filled with intriguing twists and turns. It is well-researched and thought-provoking. Also, of course, it is exciting and entertaining. It is also, however, a serious book telling a serious story – there are important lessons still to be learned and vital history still to be remembered in A Death in Vienna.
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