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.
, 
, and 
.Nimitz Class, by Patrick Robinson
Filed under: Arnold Morgan, book review, Main character, military fiction, naval fiction, Patrick Robinson, Thriller
Nimitz Class was Patrick Robinson’s first thriller and a very successful debut. It is also first in a series of political thrillers about 
In Nimitz Class, the carrier USS Thomas Jefferson, manned by a complement of 6000 crew members, patrols the waters of the Indian Ocean. Then suddenly her blip simply disappears from the radar screens of the other warships in her battle group. The ensuing investigation by the Director of the NSA, Admiral Arnold Morgan, and nuclear expert Lieutenant Commander Bill Baldridge, uncovers a complex plot that has been executed by a foreign submarine with a brilliant commander.
Baldridge and Morgan are gradually able to pin down the submarine used to perform the terrible deed. Searching from Scotland to Russia to Turkey to the South Pacific, they also manage to identify the commander of the sub – Benjamin Adnam, an Israeli citizen. But finding out whom, how and why is only half the job. The second part of the job is to locate the submarine and to permanently stop it. That turns out to be by far the most difficult task for Baldridge and Morgan.
Nimitz Class is a great suspense thriller. It is apparently not 100% correct as far as technology and US Navy operation is concerned, but as a thriller it works very well. It is written in a clear and compelling style, creates an aura of tension and surprise, is intelligently told and is very suspenseful. I also have to admit that I really love the character of Admiral Arnold Morgan, one of the saltier characters in modern thriller series. Overall, Nimitz Class is one of Patrick Robinson’s best thrillers.
“The New Frederick Forsyth.” — Guardian
“One of the crown princes of the beach-read thriller” — Stephen Coonts
The Forgotten Legion, by Ben Kane
Filed under: Ben Kane, book review, historical fiction, military fiction, recommendation
The Forgotten Legion is the debut book of Ben Kane. It is, as the name indicates, a historical fiction book set in the age of the Roman Empire, during the
The tale is about two gladiators, a soothsayer and a prostitute that all seek freedom and revenge. They are all common people, far distanced from the doings of the nobility and with much more modest and simple goals. While Julius Caesar, Pompey and Crassus struggle for control of Rome, Romulus and Fabiola, the illegitimate children of a slave raped by a nobleman, run afoul of their master and are sold off. Romulus is sold to a gladiator school and Fabiola to the city’s most fancy brothel.
Romulus is trained by Brennus, a fearsome huge Gaulian gladiator whose family was slaughtered by the Roman army. And, meanwhile, across the Forum, Fabiola, soon a favored courtesan of the social elite, vows to save her brother from certain death and to destroy the man who fathered her.
Then, after a fatal accident outside the brothel, Romulus and Brennus flee the city, joining up with Tarquinius, an Etruscan warrior who can glimpse the future. They enlist in Crassus’ army as they prepare to invade the Parthian Empire. As we know, Crassus failed miserably, and thus a legion of Roman soldiers was lost. The rest of the book is mostly their story.
The Forgotten Legion tells a great tale, and the descriptions of the battles, be they gladiatorial or army battles, are extremely well described. And the scenes of the life of the gladiators, in the brothel, and in the military, including the battles Crassus’ Roman legions fought against the Parthians, seem plausible and are very interesting.
The Forgotten Legion is a very good historical novel with several good twists and a unique and interesting perspective. Kane clearly knows the history of the period pretty well, and his story is rich in historical detail. The characterizations are not quite as good, but more than passable. His book, which reminds me a lot of Conn Iggulden in writing style, is a very welcome addition to the literature about this era.
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)
Liars & Thieves, by Stephen Coonts
Filed under: book review, Fiction, International bestseller, Jake Grafton, Steven Coonts, Thriller
(Published as Wages of Sin in the UK.) 
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.
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.Flight of the Intruder, by Stephen Coonts
Filed under: Fiction, historical fiction, military fiction, Steven Coonts
I am currently reading a book by Stephen Coonts, The Assassin. However, to some extent the reason why I am reading the book is more interesting than the book itself. Not that The Assassin isn’t a good book.
But really, I am reading it because once upon the time, long ago, I read another book by the same author which I really thought was one of the most stunning military fiction novels I had ever encountered. That book was Flight of the Intruder. This was Stephen Coonts’ first book, published in 1986. The setting is the Vietnam War. The year is 1972, a time when the war was still raging but negotiations were under way and it was becoming increasingly obvious that the USA was going to pull out sooner or later.
Flight of the Intruder tells the story of fighter pilot Jake Grafton. 
He is a young naval aviator, very respected by his peers, but still slowly coming apart under the pressures of flying an endless series of extremely hazardous yet useless missions over hostile territory in Vietnam in his A-6 Intruder, a carrier-based attack bomber. This, of course, is exactly what Stephen Coonts himself was doing at that time. So Coonts knows what he is writing about from the inside, and this makes the story and the descriptions sound and feel totally authentic.
Flight of the Intruder is a stunningly honest book. Stephen Coonts really puts the reader inside the very hearts and minds of the pilots drive these powerful, hi-tech machines. To me, he revealed a whole world totally unknown unknown to me about the naval aviators’ fraternity. The book really goes deep beneath the glamorous surface and examines the psychological tolls of war. We meet memorable characters like the young Jake Grafton and his buddies Tiger Cole, The Boxman, Sammy Lundeen, and New Guy. We get a lot of technical information about the A-6 as well as the thinking of pilots in combat situations. We are in the cockpit.
Flight of the Intruder is a story of heroes, with a great plot and lots of drive. A wonderful book which later also became a great movie. And also, I think, a better book in many ways than The Assassin.
You can read reviews of the books in Stephen Coonts’ Tommy Carmellini-series at Leserglede.com.
, Final Flight
, or The Assassin: A Novel
. Amazon also carries the movie from 1991 with Willem Dafoe and Danny Glover: Flight of the Intruder
.
Or, if you prefer, from amazon UK: Flight of the Intruder
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