Book review - "The Mozart Score" by Edwin Leather

I remember reading The Mozart Score by Edwin Leather years ago so when I saw it in a used book store, I picked it up to re-read it but I didn’t recall any of the story.

First, I’ll say that I did enjoy reading it again.  It’s a sort of a spy novel but without the undercover antics and intelligence as in Daniel Silva or Brad Thor.  The story centers on the kidnapping of an Israeli scientist Karl Reuben by Arab terrorists.  Did I mention this was published in 1977?  This takes place before the fall of the Iron Curtain and the Soviet Union.  Soviet bloc countries are still shrouded in secrecy and distrust of everyone.  Rupert Conway is an art dealer in Vienna and gets involved in the search for the scientist, since Conway is a friend of Rueben’s father.  The search takes them across Austria, Yugoslavia and Albania.

Second, the story was exciting for most of it, but the ultimate climax was rather disappointing.

Third, his writing, although full of rich details of the country and cities in southeast Europe, breaks the cardinal rule of showing rather than telling.  The omniscient narrator is pervasive throughout the story.  It made the head hops not nearly as distracting as in previous novels. 

Fourth, the opening scene in which a man is murdered during a Mozart performance in Vienna is not resolved until the last page, literally, and it seems almost an afterthought, as if Leather realized he hadn’t addressed it since the second chapter. 

Lastly, the Mozart score in the novel has nothing to do with the novel.

Leather also wrote a book The Vienna Elephant but I don’t think I’ll read it.

Two 𝅘𝅥𝅮 out of five.

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.

The Apostle by Brad Thor

In hospitals, patients in anaphylactic shock are given injections of adrenaline. They could be handed a Brad Thor novel to get the same affect. The Apostle is one adrenaline-packed rush of excitement.

In the first few pages, American doctor Julia Gallo is kidnapped by al-Qaeda in Afghanistan and the terms of her ransom are to hand over the recently captured Mustafa Khan, an al-Qaeda kingpin. The initial excitement of the book quickly evaporates into some of Thor’s jadedness. I understand that he was a member of Department of Homeland Security so he apparently knows what he’s talking about when he mentions the decline of intelligence at the CIA. But he pigeon-holes the entire American public, saying they “slept soundly in their beds at night believing their country had countless James Bonds around the world infiltrating terrorist networks and rogue regimes in order to keep them safe”. In the next paragraph, he states “As long as Americans could have their McDonald’s drive-throughs, listen to their iPods, and watch American Idol, they didn’t seem to care how negligently the nation’s national security apparatus was being run”.

I think most Americans believe in GI-Joe, the countless men and women in uniform fighting for our rights, rather than James Bond. If Americans were in the know as Thor is, I think they would definitely care about their national security apparatus. This is the stuff we don’t know about. If we did, yes, we probably would “be marching on D.C., with torches and pitchforks”.

Despite this quick and gloomy detour, the action picks back up as Scot Harvath is sent to Afghanistan, with no help from the U.S., to break into the prison and free Khan to trade for Gallo. Thor inserts a lot of information about the Afghan culture and the various high-tech gadgetry and weaponry used by international special forces to the point that at times The Apostle read like a cross between a travel guide and an operations manual.

Again, this only temporarily bogged down the story and it picks up steam. While Harvath is trying to extract Khan and rescue Gallo, there is a secondary story occurring back in the states. A Secret Service agent has overheard a private conversation between the newly elected president Robert Alden and Stephanie Gallo, mother of the kidnappee, media mogul and the money behind the president’s successful campaign bid. Gallo threatens to expose Alden’s involvement in a fatality accident that cost the life of a White House staffer and a family of four.

With only this information to go on, Elise Campbell decides to find out what happened that night. If the president was involved in the accident, Elise wants to know. She steps on a lot of toes in her search for the truth. It’s an interesting side story, but it pales in comparison to Harvath’s mission.

Faced with al-Qaeda at almost every turn and dealing with new developments in his mission, Harvath and his team manage to dog al-Qaeda’s footsteps, nearly costing their lives to complete their operation. Can they rescue Gallo without setting Khan free to continue his reign of terror? The Apostle is a nail-biter to the end.

Blowback by Brad Thor

After reading The Defector by Daniel Silva, I thought I was ready for Blowback by Brad Thor. Like the former, Blowback was the first novel I read by the author and like the former, I’m ready for more. Both are action-packed spy novels with pulse pounding excitement.

Since I’ve been turned onto spy novels, a new genre for me, only I thoroughly enjoyed Blowback. Compared to Gabriel Allon in The Defector, Thor’s main character Scot Harvath is tougher, less suave and much less subtle.

However, Scot’s playing with a different set of rules. While trying to apprehend a notorious terrorist in Afghanistan, he is caught on tape beating a seemingly innocent market vendor. An ambitious senator with her sights on the White House tries to serve his head from a silver catapult to oust the current president. The commander-in-Chief has no choice but to ask for Harvath’s resignation.

With his next breath, the president hires him back in secret. A strange virus has decimated all but the Muslim population of a small village in north Afghanistan and Harvath is the person best qualified and now, most expendable to find out what’s going on.

The repercussions from this virus are staggering. The West suspects Al-queda may have a terrifying weapon at their disposal. But how? The terrorist group and their sympathizers don’t have the capability to engineer a virus or a plague that affects only non-Muslims.

Harvath finds that there is a connection between the lethal illness that turns its victims’ brains into a black goo and the discovery underneath a glacier in the French Alps. Since Harvath is officially ostracized from Washington, he has to rely on his own resources with minimal help from the very few who are in-the-know about his situation.

Still he manages to bounce all over the globe, where money is no object and avoiding ID checks at border crossings, since he is wanted for murder in a number of countries.

Thor includes plenty of cliffhangers but what really stretches the imagination is Harvath’s near-indestructibility and extreme luck. He gets out of more scrapes and close-calls than Indiana Jones. Nevertheless, it’s all in good fun.

To me, Blowback is a terrific book that I couldn’t put down. Even readers who aren’t fans of thrillers and spy novels may enjoy this.