Title: 72 Virgins
Author: Avi Perry
Illustrator:
Publisher and/or Distributor: Gradient Publishing
Pages: 385
ISBN: 9780615280516
Price: $19.95
Publishing Date: 2009
Reader: Bob Spear
Rating: 3 hearts
This interesting thriller tells the story of a brilliantly talented Israeli Defense Force Officer, Major Erik Golan, who has been a high tech warrior for nine years. It’s now time for him to follow his fiancé, Rachel, out of the service and cash in on his skills as a technology entrepreneur. Unfortunately, the Mossad has other ideas. They trick the couple into going on a mission to Southeast Asia, where Rachel is taken hostage by a terror group and Erik barely escapes with his life. Told that Rachel is now dead, Erik declares a campaign of vengeance and agrees to go undercover as an Islamic terrorist. He crosses swords with a truly vicious terrorist leader, Abu Musa, who sees Erik, known by his cover name “Qassem al-Nasr” from Egypt, as an organizational competitor to be either overcome or wiped out. Things get really dicey when Abu decides to attack high priority Western Christian targets (well known cathedrals during major religious events) with both fertilizer bombs and individual suicide bombers carrying explosive that will produce the deadly chemical warfare agent know as Sarin. Will Abu Musa be foiled? Will Erik survive and gain revenge? Is all as it seems? Read the book to find out.
The author does a wonderful job of going into the minds of radical Islamists to illustrate how their belief that they will sit by Allah’s side in Paradise and be given their very own 72 virgins who will serve their every need throughout eternity drives them in their fanaticism. Perry brings to the table elements from his own past to explain the shadowy world of counter terrorism and its intelligence support system. Of significant value is how terrorist set up and operate support networks in Europe and the United States; how they use non-Islamics as stooges, and the technologies and methodologies the Mossad and Homeland Security use to thwart terrorist attacks and organizations. We rated this exciting thriller three hearts.
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Title: The Archangel Project
Author: C.S. Graham
Illustrator:
Publisher and/or Distributor: Harper
Pages: 384
ISBN: 9780061351204
Price: $7.99
Publishing Date: Sep 2008
Reader: Bob Spear
Rating: 5 hearts
This superb thriller is based on “remote viewing,” the ability to psychically observe targets at a distance. A remote viewing young lady, an Iraqi vet, plays an important role with a CIA operative in saving the President from a complex assassination attempt. This is a finely structured, edge of your chair novel. We rated it five hearts.
Title: The Testament
Author: Eric Van Lustbader
Illustrator:
Publisher and/or Distributor: Tor Publishing
Pages: 469
ISBN: 978-0-7653-5343-6
Price: $7.99
Publishing Date: 2006
Reader: Bob Spear
Rating: 4 hearts
This is another spin-off the Da Vinci Code that includes a mysterious legacy as guardian to a testament supposedly written by Christ. A member of the Order of Gnostic Observatines, the protagonist Bravo Shaw begins learning what this unexpected role truly means, while at the same time a rival organization, the Knights of St. Clement, are seeking to gain control of the testament. Bravo’s challenge is to find the testament he’s now responsible for before the Knights of St. Clement. During the hunt, Bravo is surrounded by betrayers and doesn’t know who to trust.
The author always writes a good thriller and has many good ones under his belt. We rated this one four hearts.
Title: The Genesis Code
Author: Christopher Forrest
Illustrator:
Publisher and/or Distributor: Forge / Tor Publishing
Pages: 301
ISBN: 978-0-7653-1603-5
Price: $23.95
Publishing Date: August 2007
Reader: Bob Spear
Rating: 4 hearts
This scientific/conspiracy thriller is based on the idea that the human gene was programmed with a message that warns us of a coming recurring disaster to the world. Employees from a genetics research laboratory are seeking to decode this message while their efforts are being countered and physically attacked by a secret group that has been keeping the secret of the existence and the meaning of this code from the beginning of mankind.
This is a fast paced thriller with wonderful twists and plot turns. The author takes on some difficult topics such as cryptology, genetics, archeology, and others. We rated it four hearts.
Title: Lost Girls
Author: Robert Doherty
Illustrator:
Publisher and/or Distributor: Forge Books
Pages: 304
ISBN: 978-0-7653-1127-6
Price: $24.95
Publishing Date: Aug 2007
Reader: Bob Spear
Rating: 4 hearts
A time-honored sub-genre of the spy and adventure category comes under of the heading of “Who’s watching the watchers?” The idea of a super secret government agency made up of stone killers with the mission of keeping all the government agencies righteous and above board has been used many times. They’re the equivalent of the double ought agents of James Bond fame. Such is a group called “The Cellar.” Think of them as problem solvers with a license to kill.
Someone is kidnapping and killing young ladies whose fathers belonged to several government agencies, such as the State Department, DEA, CIA, Military Special Ops, and so on. The only common link is a tragically failed sniper mission in Central America. The Cellar agents have to sort out all this while their super secret group sorts out a changing of the guard. We rated this thriller a high four hearts.
Title: The Cutting Season
Author: Arthur Rosenfeld
Illustrator:
Publisher and/or Distributor: YMAA
Pages: 308
ISBN: 978-1-59439-082-1
Price: $21.95
Publishing Date: 2007
Reader: Bob Spear
Rating: 5 hearts
This is the first foray into the area of fiction that this superb martial arts publisher has made and it is home run. A medical/martial arts thriller, this story follows a talented brain surgeon’s trip down the slippery slope of the dark side. Dr. Xenon Pearl finds himself coming to the defense of those he loves and those he barely knows but feels they need a champion. His weapon of choice is a Chinese martial arts sword, but he is a master of any bladed weapon, including the scalpel.
This promises to be the start of a great new series. The author is a highly successful author, a martial arts master and teacher, and a subject matter expert consultant for the pharmaceutical industry. He was the perfect choice to begin a new direction with this fiction genre. We rated his book five hearts.
Title: Heart Sick
Author: Chelsea Cain
Illustrator:
Publisher and/or Distributor: St Martins Minotaur
Pages: 336
ISBN: 0-312-36846-1
Price: $23.95
Publishing Date: 2007
Reader: Bob Spear
Rating: 5 hearts
This suspenseful thriller is an amazingly good read. Heart Sick will pique your curiosity as to how Gretchen, a serial killer sadist locked away for life, can continue to manipulate her only surviving torture victim, Detective Archie Sheraton. Two years later Archie has come out of medical retirement brought about by this sadist who kidnapped and tortured him for ten days, kept him alive, and turned herself in to the police rather than let him die by her hand. These two have major issues, to say the least. Learn how Archie uses a young journalist, Susan, to put his PTSD symptoms to rest. The pace is energizing. Some of the characters are chilling and some are really unique. The protagonist is definitely flawed. The dialog is realistic and points of view are appropriate. We rated this book five hearts.
Title: A Monk Jumped Over a Wall
Author: Jay Nussbaum
Illustrator:
Publisher and/or Distributor: The Toby Press
Pages: 383
ISBN: 978-1-59264-201-4
Price: $14.95
Publishing Date: 1 Nov 2007
Reader: Bob Spear
Rating: 5 hearts
Named after a legendary Chinese soup, this legal thriller tracks the career of a young lawyer who takes a job with a heartless corporate law firm in NYC. He quickly becomes disillusioned with the foreclosures of personal residence mortgages for a wealthy client. By trying to help a couple save their home, he gets fired and has been reported to a legal board which threatens to disbar him. He is assisted by one of his law school professors, his best friend at the corporate law firm, and a beautiful young lady.
The author uses flashbacks to tell an intriguing back-story of how the young lawyer got into this dilemma. He excels at developing relationships, using realistic dialog, and developing a feasible plot where lemonade gets made from the lemons which are thrown at the protagonist. The author obviously understands the pros and cons of law careers and the ethical decisions which rear their ugly heads along the way. The bottom line of this novel is, “Be true to yourself and your friends.” We rated it five hearts.
Title: 13 Days: The Pythagoras Conspiracy
Author: L.A. Starks
Illustrator:
Publisher and/or Distributor: Brown Books Publishing Group
Pages: 347
ISBN: 1-933285-45-1
Price: $15.95
Publishing Date: 2006
Reader: Bob Spear
Rating: 4 hearts
This thriller gives a highly technical description and explanation of how vulnerable our oil refineries are. The lady protagonist, Lynn Dayton, is faced with multiple threats to a recently purchased refinery down in Texas over which she has managerial control. Although numerous attempts are made on the facility and lives are lost, Lynn doesn’t realize the source of her problems lives in France and that her sister has been gravely mishandled and abused by the very same person who has been behind the recent attacks on the refinery. This book is worthy of a careful read, and yet it provides entertainment and food for thought as to the vulnerability of our petroleum industry and society in general. We rated it four hearts.
Title: The Vengeance Trap
Author: A.L. Hansen
Illustrator:
Publisher and/or Distributor: Ophir Publishing
Pages: 428
ISBN: 978-0-9787658-1-1
Price: 10
Publishing Date: June 2007
Reader: Bob Spear
Rating: 4 hearts
This thriller/family saga begins with a young lady who is a gun buyer for the IRA and her common-law husband, a wealthy modern pirate from off the coast of Iran. Between them they build a family, an empire, and the basis for a future laced with tragedy and revenge. This is a very fast-paced romantic adventure involving settings from around the world.
The author is donating the royalties from this book to help some of America’s wounded war heroes get a bedside visit from their families. The money is going to the VA. They have promised to use it to help pay the travel cost for families who live far from the hospitals and can’t afford the trip. For every paperback copy of this book someone buys, the publisher will send a second paperback free either to a soldier on duty or a vet in the hospital. Contact the publisher for more information. We rated this book a very high four hearts.
Title: Allah’s Torch: Haram Saadeq: Forbidden Truths
Author: D E Gronquist
Illustrator:
Publisher and/or Distributor: Author House
Pages: 230
ISBN: 978-1425951351
Price: $11.95
Publishing Date: 2006
Reader: Bob Spear
Rating: 3 hearts
A man and a woman, two CIA analysts who were flunkouts from field agent training at “The Farm” training site, are suddenly tagged to go into Arabia clandestinely. The Saudi family have been overthrown by radical Islamics and the Arabian oil fields have been rendered unusable by atomic explosions. The two must track down a Russian nuclear weapon, which the radicals are calling Allah’s Torch.
This book is important because of the Arabian background information , which is presented within the framework of fiction. The horrific plight of women and children in Arabian society will give the reader an idea of the extent of human rights violations in the Middle East. We rated this book three hearts.
Title: The Lost Constitution
Author: William Martin
Illustrator:
Publisher and/or Distributor: Forge Books
Pages: 512
ISBN: 978-0-765-31538-0
Price: $24.95
Publishing Date: May 2007
Reader: Bob Spear
Rating: 4 hearts
Two things that Forge Books does well are to find excellent writers of thrillers and historical novels. In this book’s case, they’ve managed to do both. A modern day collectible document dealer finds himself in a race against time and a political fight to find the first draft of the Constitution with margin notes written by the founding fathers. Liberal and conservative demagogues are sharpening their swords, getting ready to fight over what the first and second amendments really mean and what was intended by the founding fathers. Opposing parties back and assail the deal and his lady friend from all sides, using deadly hirelings who are killing all who threaten their retainers’ views about life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. In between run ins with danger, the story bounces back to the 17 and 18 hundreds to track one family’s involvement in finding and safe guarding this document for their descendents’ posterity.
The pace is fast, almost confusing at times because of the two plot lines’ complexity, but it all comes out in the end. We rated this exciting read four hearts.
Title: Crescent Veil
Author: Judith Saunders and Dr. Frank J. Malinowski
Illustrator:
Publisher and/or Distributor: BookSurge Publishing
Pages: 513
ISBN: 978-1-4196-1880-2
Price: $19.99
Publishing Date: May 2006
Reader: Bob Spear
Rating: 5 hearts
Co-authored by a nurse and a doctor who both served at the US Army’s primary research facility for biological weapons and the good doctor has also served as a United Nations weapons inspector in Russia and Iraq, this medical thriller proposes the what if of a renegade Bathist General who knows where Saddam hid the WMDs and intends to use them on the rest of the world. Using a clever mixture of real-life and fictional characters, the authors use a team of special ops doctors and a Native American ex-SEAL to track down the threats and eliminate the renegade and his forces. This is non-stop action based on the real deal by authors who should know what they are presenting as a highly realistic and chilling scenario. We rated this excellent thriller five hearts.
Title: Gargoyles
Author: Alan Nayes
Illustrator:
Publisher and/or Distributor: Tor
Pages: 376
ISBN: 0-765-34056-9
Price: $6.99
Publishing Date: 2001
Reader: Bob Spear
Rating: 4 hearts
This is a medical thriller on par with Robin Cook’s. A young pre-med student desperately needs money to pay for her mother’s cancer treatments. She finds possible salvation by agreeing to become a surrogate mother. Constantly reassuring medical and administrative personnel in the surrogate company tell her there are loving parents who are anxious to provide a good home to her baby when it is born. All is not well in paradise, however, as protagonist Amoreena keeps stumbling into people and clues that indicate she might be carrying to term something all together different than what she has been told.
The scariest aspect of this novel is how true it may become. The attractiveness of human genetic manipulations to produce super warriors or an ideal subservient slave class for global corporations and governments is way too possible. We rated this book four hearts.
Title: Shadow Laws
Author: Jim M. Hansen
Illustrator:
Publisher and/or Distributor: Dark Sky Publishing
Pages: 396
ISBN: 9780976924340
Price: $13.95
Publishing Date:Dec 2006
Reader: Bob Spear
Rating: 5 hearts
This is the second crime thriller I have read by this author. The first, Night Laws, was superb and this new one is even better. There must be something in the mountain air around Golden, Colorado just west and north of Denver that produces such fine writers of mysteries and thrillers. Several ones I have reviewed share common backgrounds and talents, and Jim Hansen is no exception. The current story is about unintended consequences and a wily serial killer who takes having his proclivities used by others who need to get rid of a little excess baggage rather resentfully. There are so many twists, turns, and gottcha’s in this story, that it keeps the reader guessing and surprised all the way to the end. It even includes a homicide detective chief who isn’t above a little frontier justice every now and then. The author is especially ambitious to juggle two protagonists—the detective and a smart lady lawyer who seem at times to be working at cross purposes. We rated the author’s second book five hearts of heart stopping action.
Title: Ageless Tear
Author: Linda Gale Vettel
Illustrator:
Publisher and/or Distributor: Action Novels 4U
Pages: 304
ISBN: 0-9716996-2-3
Price: $12.95
Publishing Date: 2004
Reader: Bob Spear
Rating:
Ageless Tear is a romantic thriller in which an undercover agent adopts a baby girl to enhance the believability of his cover and hires the child’s birth mother as a nanny. They travel the world, experiencing all kinds of adventures together, while living a platonic marriage of convenience. The inevitable development of true love between all involved eventually brings joy and happiness to all. We rated this book three hearts.
Title: Golem
Author: Greg Vilk
Illustrator:
Publisher and/or Distributor: Ricochet Press
Pages: 170
ISBN: 0-9772189-0-2
Price: $13.95
Publishing Date: 2005
Reader: Bob Spear
Rating:
A US Army Ranger unit straight out of the school of the “Dirty Dozen” is pulled out of the Pacific Theater during World War II to jump into Northern Greenland to fight against a monster which has taken over an SS base—a golem, which has the ability to form itself out of any convenient material. It keeps growing bigger and smarter and more dangerous to the world. There exists a secret coded message that gives out the secret to effectively countering this threat and a beautiful lady scientist to decipher it. Will she de-code it in time?
This is a classic Hollywood thriller and reads like a screen treatment. Full of action, it reads like “The Dirty Dozen” meets “Indiana Jones.” The pace is non-stop. There is action, violence, romance, secret codes, and Nazi threats. At the same time, there is an excellent mix of flawed characters who have to work through both the problems of countering the golem and dealing with their own character flaws. We rated this book four hearts.
Title: Sledgehammer
Author: Paulo J. Reyes
Illustrator:
Publisher and/or Distributor: iUniverse
Pages: 200
ISBN: 0-595-66984-0
Price: $24.95
Publishing Date: 2005
Reader: Bob Spear
Rating:
An emergency room doctor suspects a bio-terrorism weapon in the form of smallpox has been introduced into his hospital. He finds himself torn between nailing down the identity of the disease with certainty and fighting with naysayers which include the business administrator of his own hospital. This conflict and uncertainty builds throughout the story, bringing the reader to the edge of his chair.
The author, himself an emergency room physician, brings us inside the high pressure, overworked environment of the ER. He also gives us a glimpse of how unready this country is to deal with bio-terrorism. We rated this medical thriller five hearts.
Title: Superior Position
Author: Evan McNamara
Illustrator:
Publisher and/or Distributor: Berkley Publishing Group
Pages: 370
ISBN: 0-425-20390-5
Price: $7.99
Publishing Date: 2004
Reader: Bob Spear
Rating:
The author of this fast moving suspense thriller is an ex-Army officer and commander of snipers. His unique background allowed him to write this story about a returned soldier/sniper who becomes a deputy sheriff in a small Colorado mountain community. Protagonist Bill Tatum is out for an early morning run when he discovers a woman’s body in a small river by his trail. He calls for backup, and the sheriff and another deputy respond. As they begin to examine the crime site, a sniper shoots the other deputy. This kicks off the steady elimination of some of the community’s most important people. Tatum is put in charge of finding and stopping the sniper.
The story is filled with excellent sniper/counter-sniper tactics. The pace is blindingly quick, and the hide and seek maneuvers between protagonist and antagonist are spellbinding. The author makes his story come alive. We rated this book a very high four hearts.
