Tag Archives: espionage

soviet comeback

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Soviet Comeback by Jamie Smyth

This post may contain spoilers.

I met the author of this book on a hike with the walking club. He was over visiting a relative and joined us as a guest. A few others were talking to him about the book and having gotten the details I was intrigued enough to give it a read. Despite liking the guy and really wanting to like the book I found it pretty weak. However, it is his first published book and it is a starting point.

The concept of the story is quite good. Nikita is the young son of Nigerian refugees that somehow end up living in Communist USSR in the 1980s. The KGB take him from his family and train him as a special agent to carry out espionage and assassinations in America. There is a theme of racism that runs through the whole book as Nikita tries to fit in to a life that doesn’t belong in either the Soviet Union or the US where he eventually ends up.

Overall I found the book disappointing. It was too long with too many locations used before it finally settled down on the main story. The bad guys were almost comic book baddies stopping just short of the maniacal laugh and moustache twirling. The scene plots felt formulaic and predictable and the romantic involvements unrealistic. Overall it felt over edited as if the author went over and over the writing until it was worn out.

My biggest issue was how the racism was dealt with. I’m pretty sure that growing up as a black man in Russia or America in the ’80s would not have been pleasant but it all seemed very OTT and again almost comic book baddie style. I’m not sure it is easy for a white man from the UK to write about racism in a time before he was born and I have absolutely nothing to measure his success against but it didn’t feel right to me.

Overall it wasn’t a bad book but I did find it difficult to stay engaged all the way to the end. If he writes a second I’ll probably give it a go just to see how he develops as an author.

My Rating: ⭐⭐

More on Goodreads and Amazon.

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the assassin

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The Assassin (Ryan Kealey #2) by Andrew Britton

This post may contain spoilers.

This was the first book for quite a while that I was going to give up on. I still don’t know how I managed to get to the end! The story picks up one year after the events of The American. Ryan Kealey has become a loose cannon acting outside the law in Iraq supposedly under the control of the CIA. He starts by placing a Special Forces team in great jeopardy during an operation where he goes rogue and pretty much gets black carded by everyone from the FBI to the President.

His arch enemy is back, he falls head over heels in love again and Vanderveen tries to kill her. This time though he also tries to wipe out half the population of New York with a huge bomb in Times Square aimed at destroying a key Iraqi alliance and causing Civil War in Iraq as the US try to withdraw. Kealey battles against the system to save America, beat Vanderveen and rescue his love. Good plot but badly written.

I just found the whole thing way too complicated and far fetched. I couldn’t keep track of all the players, way too many names on both the Arab and US sides and a plot that switched around far too much.

However, what really ragged me was how stupid Kealey and Vanderveen were at times. They’re both highly trained special forces operatives who are supposedly at the top of their game. However, the author constantly inserted idiotic, emotional or novice errors in their decisions and behaviours that were simply wrong for their characters. Lazy writing to force the story to where he needed it to be. A typical example is when Kealey leaves Naomi handcuffed in the warehouse simply so Vanderveen can capture her again. Only that I was so close to the end I would have stopped here.

Some good bits that were eclipsed by the bad and although the next book is supposed to be much better I don’t know if I’ll bother.

⭐⭐

Goodreads

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the cardinal of the kremlin

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The Cardinal of the Kremlin (Jack Ryan #4) by Tom Clancy.

From Goodreads:

In a rolling sea off the coast of South America, a target disappears in a puff of green light. In the Soviet hills of Dushanbe near the Afghanistan border, an otherworldly array of pillars and domes rises into the night. To the two greatest nations on earth, no contest is more urgent than the race to build the first Star Wars missile defense system, and no one knows that more than the two men charged with assessing the Soviets’ capabilities: Colonel Mikhail Filitov of the Soviet Union, an old-line warrior distrusted by the army’s new inner circle of technocrats, and CIA analyst Jack Ryan, hero of the Red October affair.

Each must use all his craft to arrive at the truth, but Filitov gets there first — and that’s when all hell breaks loose. Because Filitov, code-named Cardinal, is America’s highest agent in the Kremlin, and he is about to be betrayed to the KGB. His rescue could spell the difference between peace and war, and it is up to Jack Ryan to accomplish it — if he can — as, in a breathtaking sequence of hunter and hunted, Filitov’s life, and Ryan’s and that of the world itself literally hang in the balance.

My Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐

I’ve been disappointed by many of the previous books in the series but this was very good. There is much more of a storyline and much less mind numbing technical and military detail. Altogether there are three strands to the story with a CIA, Russian and Afghan element. I would have liked to have seen more development of the Afghan storyline but it’s there for a plot line purpose and just serves that.

Refreshingly in this story Clancy spends much less time degrading Soviet society and highlighting its faults. It still comes across as a corrupt and faulty society both socially and politically but more as part of the story and not rammed in the reader’s face. Additionally, the book is chock full of strong characters and a good number of these are on the Soviet side this time. The most notable is the old war hero Misha but the young soldier Bondarenko and the KGB investigator Vatutin are also excellent characters. In many ways the Soviets are the stars of this book while Ryan himself is in more of a supporting role.

I also particularly enjoyed the espionage of the first half of the book. There is a great sense of pace and tension as well as a good insight into the operations of both the CIA and KGB spy networks, how the agents operated and how they passed along information while staying undetected. Considering the disappointment of Red Rabbit this was a much better and more enjoyable book.

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red rabbit

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Red Rabbit (Jack Ryan #2) by Tom Clancy

From Goodreads:

Long before he was President or head of the CIA, before he fought terrorist attacks on the Super Bowl or the White House, even before a submarine named Red October made its perilous way across the Atlantic, Jack Ryan was an historian, teacher, and recent ex-Marine temporarily living in England while researching a book. A series of deadly encounters with an IRA splinter group had brought him to the attention of the CIA’s Deputy Director, Vice Admiral James Greer—as well as his counterpart with the British SIS, Sir Basil Charleston—and when Greer asked him if he wanted to come aboard as a freelance analyst, Jack was quick to accept. The opportunity was irresistible, and he was sure he could fit it in with the rest of his work.

And then Jack forgot all about the rest of his work, because one of his first assignments was to help debrief a high-level Soviet defector, and the defector told an amazing tale: Top Soviet officials, including Yuri Andropov, were planning to assassinate the Pope, John Paul II.

Could it be true? As the days and weeks go by, Ryan must battle, first to try to confirm the plot, and then to prevent it, but this is a brave new world, and nothing he has done up to now has prepared him for the lethal game of cat-and-mouse that is the Soviet Union versus the United States. In the end, it will be not just the Pope’s life but the stability of the Western world that is at stake. . . and it may already be too late for a novice CIA analyst to do anything about it.

My Rating: ⭐⭐

I really struggled with this. The writing is slow and ponderous. The storyline has so much potential for excitement and intrigue with the CIA v KGB to bring across a high level defector and based around an assassination attempt on Pope John Paul II. However, Clancy manages to make it dull and boring.

There is far too much boring detail, far too much to and fro on inconsequential details and far too many characters with minor roles that make it difficult to follow. The main characters are unlikeable. There is a consistent arrogance from everyone towards the culture and traditions of everyone else that gets wearisome very quickly. Ryan and his wife have a particularly condescending attitude towards British life and portray what appears to be a serious personal issue of Clancy’s towards the NHS that is jarring and doesn’t contribute to the story.

The only likeable character in the whole story is Oleg, the Russian defector with a developing conscience around the assassination of the Pope and his desire for a better life for his family.

I struggle to see why this book became a #1 bestseller. I wonder what the competition at the time was?

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