Run for Your Life, by James Patterson and Michael Ledwidge
Filed under: bestseller, book review, James Patterson, Thriller
A calculating killer who calls himself The Teacher is taking on New York City, killing the powerful and the arrogant. His message is clear: remember your manners or suffer the consequences!
The Commissioner deems Michael Bennett’s experience with the Catastrophic Response Unit as critical to leading the investigation. The Commissioner’s concern and his request of Bennett appear even more justified as the Teacher next strikes by murdering an maitre d’ at a fancy New York Twenty-One Club. The Chase is on, and Michael Bennett, the hero of Step on a Crack, is running against the clock again.
At first these murders appear to be directed at somewhat random people or perhaps people that cater to the rich, but as Bennett and others in the police force, soon find a pattern in the killings. And discovering a secret pattern in The Teacher’s lessons, Detective Bennett realizes he has just hours to save New York from the greatest disaster in its history.
James Patterson’s books are up and down. Some good, some not so good, some pretty bad. I don’t expect too much when I start reading a new book by him, but I still for some reason do read them. I mostly like his writing style and the pace of his stories, I think. There are few dull moments in his books. The short chapters are nice. As well, you can read the whole book in a day.
I liked the main character Michael Bennett. He is a NYPD cop and single dad with an astonishing number of kids. And he is a likable, smart guy. A humane fellow of sorts too.
The storyline of the book, however, I didn’t much care for. But Run for Your Life is a better book than Step On a Crack. I recommend it to Patterson fans and fans of fast action thrillers.
A Calculated Risk, by Katherine Neville
Filed under: book review, Katherine Neville, Thriller
I read this book largely because I have recently read The Eight by the same author, and liked it a lot. However, this is a much shorter book than Neville’s first book, The Eight, somewhat more humorous, and not nearly as good. To some extent it may be read as a satire on the world of banking.
The heroine of A Calculated Risk is Verity Banks. Verity is a computer expert. Currently she is a vice-president of
the Bank of the World in San Francisco, in charge of Electronic Funds Transfer.
When her boss turns down her proposal for a tighter security system at the bank, Verity decides to break through security, hide some money where no one will find it, and then put it back, to show everyone how easily it can be done. However, when she seeks advice from her former mentor, Dr. Zoltan Tor, he surprises her by giving her a challenge that adds a new twist to her own plan: Which of them can steal $1 billion, and invest it to earn $30 million in only three months? (The money will be returned, and no one will be injured.)
If Verity wins, Tor will get her a job at the Federal Reserve that she wants. If Tor wins, Verity will come to New York to work for him. However, while working on their scams, Tor and Verity stumble on a plan by members of the Vagabond Club, a club of CEOs of major corporations, to take over the Bank of the World in a financial coup, possibly sending the U.S. economy into a tailspin.
I enjoyed A Calculated Risk, but in my opinion it is not in the same league as The Eight. Both Zoltan Tor and Verity Banks are very likable characters, and the relationship between them interesting. As well, the plot is interesting, but the drive is somewhat lacking. The pace is a tad too slow and the side-stories not quite interesting enough.
Running Blind, by Desmond Bagley – classic thriller
Running Blind is another of the thrillers by English thriller master Desmond Bagley that has been made into a movie. It is a great, very suspenseful roller-coaster of a novel that tied me to me chair. 
It all begins with a simple errand – a package to deliver. “It’ll be simple”, they said at the Department. “You’ll just be a messenger boy.” But to Alan Stewart, on a deserted road in Iceland with a murdered man at his feet, it looks anything but simple. Almost immediately, he finds himself in a maze of bluffs and double-bluffs. Set amongst some of the most dramatic scenery in the world, Stewart and his girlfriend, Erin, are faced with treacherous natural obstacles and deadly threats, as they battle to carry out the mission.
Stewart escapes a very cunning trap and in doing so stumbles, almost by accident, on the scary possibility that a top official in British intelligence may actually be a Russian mole. What follows is a spellbinding sequence of action involving the mole, the Russians, some stray CIA agents in fascinating pursuit all across Iceland.
Running Blind culminates in a shootout that contains a huge surprise, and a shocking conclusion.
An excellent thriller! The language and descriptions are excellent, the plot full of surprising twists, and the suspense almost intolerable. Running Blind moves at a faster pace than the average Bagley novel. Still very well worth reading!
The Last Frontier, by Alistair MacLean
Filed under: Alistair MacLean, book review, Thriller
(a k a The Secret Ways) This 
Michael Reynolds is a capable agent but not a superman. He doesn’t even have any fancy technology. He is well trained and resourceful. His skills are immediately put to the test when something goes wrong and he falls into the hands of the ruthless Hungarian Secret Police. In an attempt to continue his mission, he seeks the help of the leader of an underground movement that is set up to smuggle Hungarians over the border into the West.
The Last Frontier was published in 1959, just three years after the crushing of the October Revolution by the Russian troops. It is a tough book to read, and an excellent spy thriller. If you don’t know or have forgotten just how hard-fought the Cold War was for the United States and its Western Allies, and how desperate many people in the Eastern European countries were under Soviet rule, this may be a good book to read. It is, I think, very realistic on some levels, and besides: it is great entertainment, and very exciting. The Last Frontier is recommended to fans of Cold War spy fiction and to fans of Alistair MacLean.
Praise for The Last Frontier:
‘Breathless, bloody and detailed.’ Daily Telegraph
‘Swift-moving, with a tremendous climactic scene on the snow-swept roof of a trans-Hungarian express.’ Glasgow Herald
, Amazon UK
, and Amazon CAN
. See also Bokkilden.no and Tanum.The Eleventh Commandment, by Jeffrey Archer
Filed under: bestseller, book review, Fiction, Jeffrey Archer, New York Times bestseller, Thriller
Connor Fitzgerald works for the CIA. Nobody knows of his double life, 
Actually, Connor is being sent on a bogus mission, set up by the director of the CIA, presumably with the permission of the White House. The job ploy is to eliminate Connor, who has, in the Director’s view, become a threat to her job.
The Eleventh Commandment is another Jeffrey Archer-tale with a lot of twists in the tale, and clearly with some references to the goings on of the real world. Well worth an intensive weekend of reading!
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.
High Citadel, by Desmond Bagley
Filed under: bestseller, book review, Desmond Bagley, Thriller
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, 
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.
The Bourne Deception, by Eric van Lustbader, Robert Ludlum
Filed under: book review, Eric van Lustbader, Jason Bourne, Robert Ludlum, Thriller
Robert Ludlum died in March 2001, but even so 
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
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.
Shadow Account, by Stephen Frey
Filed under: bestseller, book review, New York Times bestseller, Stephen Frey, Thriller
Stephen Frey, who is a specialist in mergers and acquisitions 
We meet up with the main character, Connor Ashby is in his apartment in Manhattan, with his wealthy engaged to someone else girlfriend Liz Shaw. Then an email addressed to a person named Victor arrives. The email indicates that revenues are profit is being manipulated in a very big but unnamed firm. Connor realizes the email he received was an error, but before he can decide what to do Liz sends him out to buy cigarettes. When he returns Liz has been killed, the apartment has been completely trashed and a goon is trying to kill him. Responding quickly, he manages to get out of the apartment and run off. However, when he returns with the police, his apartment is clean, nothing is broken, and there is no corpse. It is as if nothing has happened.
As he follows a twisting trail of misdeeds and misinformation that stretches nationwide, Conner slowly uncovers a shocking plot as undeniably real as the gunshot wound in his arm. Now, surviving will mean struggling to expose the truth as relentlessly as his shadowy enemies seek to conceal it— and fighting for his life as ruthlessly as those determined to end it.
Shadow Account has a good plot, and it quickly hooks you. And in the course of the story, Frey explains the complex financial issues in a fashion that makes them understandable. Having read this book, you will better understand some of the recent meltdown scandals like Enron.
Stephen Frey’s novels of big money and murder in the world of finance have earned this New York Times bestselling author a richly deserved reputation as a master of suspense who always delivers a high yield. Now he raises the stakes, and the risk factor, in this new thriller that pits a young Wall Street player against corporate conspiracy and White House intrigue—in a dangerous game of double crosses, dirty tricks, and deadly consequences.
Shadow Account. It does jump and twist a little here and there, and may be a little too convoluted at times, but it is a very entertaining and enjoyable read in a genre with relatively few very good writers.
Arctic Drift, by Clive Cussler & Dirk Cussler
Filed under: bestseller, Clive Cussler, technothriller, Thriller
Clive Cussler is a big bestselling author in the United States. He pretty 
In Arctic Drift, Clive Cussler and his son Dirk imagine the U.S. and Canada on the brink of war. This is their third collaborative novel (after Treasure of Khan
and Black Wind
Here, the price of gas hits $10 a gallon, and US President Garner Ward must contend with a corrupt Canadian cabal that’s subverting efforts to solve America’s energy problems. Pitt barely escapes serious injury when a bomb destroys a D.C. lab along with records of research into an artificial photosynthesis process that could, almost immediately, eliminate the threat of global warming.
But despair not – Dirk Pitt is on the case. It looks very bleak, and events do certainly seem to escalate out of control. But the Pitts manage to connect the dots, and eventually the greedy guys are defeated and peace reigns yet again. Till next time.
Thriller fans in search of a quick, exciting read should be satisfied. There is lots of breathtaking suspense and audacious imagination in Arctic Drift, as in all the books in the Pitt series. And, yes, it is entertaining. As it were.
Praise:
‘the action zipping along until a final powerhouse showdown’ (Entertainment Weekly).
‘What’s not to like?’ (Los Angeles Times)
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