Book review - "The Athena Project" by Brad Thor

 

I’ve enjoyed reading the Adventures of Scot Harvath, super-spy, by Brad Thor, so the setting of his novel, The Athena Project, appeared to be interesting change from his main character.  Instead of one guy acting alone, this novel features a team of four women in pretty much the same role as Scot.  They are smart, beautiful and deadly.

The book basically sends out two messages: one, men have one track minds and two, a sexy woman in a little black dress can open any door.  ANY door, because of message number one.

Thor’s story has several humorous sections where the women, Megan Rhodes, Gretchen Casey, Julie Ericsson and Alex Cooper laugh at how easily they can manipulate men with a pretty smile, cleavage, a bottle of booze and the promise of a good time.

Their first adventure is sneaking into a private party in Venice, thrown by a known weapons dealer responsible for procuring the explosives that killed many Americans.  Their seduction of the dirty, old man is interrupted and they must shoot their way out.  Which they have to do several more times.  But they always get their man.

The main plot is that Nazi scientists were working on mind-blowing experiments when WWII ended.  The USSR worked to get those scientists into the Russia, but the US was more interested in their work.  In some cases, laboratories were destroyed but in other cases, they were flooded or booby-trapped and the entrances caved in. 

One experiment involved teleportation.  The Nazis experimented on Jewish people with disastrous results.  They never perfected it but the laboratory where the research was conducted had been rumored to be discovered.  The Athena team is sent in to ascertain if the technology was actually hidden in a cave in the Czech Republic.  If so, America’s enemies could teleport electromagnetic disrupting bombs all over the country, paralyzing it.

There is plenty of action to keep the book interesting without being overwhelmed by violence.  Thor gives his team plenty of seemingly impossible missions but never becoming so overtly incredible that they become unbelievable. 

The only downside to the book was the plot thread involving Denver International Airport.  It almost seemed an afterthought to lengthen the story but it just ended without much resolution. 

Despite that tangential thread, I hope Thor continues this series.