Books by Walsh, Michael
- Walsh, Michael. Early Warning. New York: Pinnacle Books, 2010. ISBN 978-0-7860-2043-0.
- This is the second novel in the author's “Devlin” series of thrillers. When I read the first, Hostile Intent, I described it as a “tangled, muddled mess” and concluded that the author “may eventually master the thriller, but I doubt I'll read any of the sequels to find out for myself”. Well, I did go ahead and read the next book in the series, and I'm pleased to report that the versatile and accomplished author (see the review of Hostile Intent for a brief biography and summary of his other work) has indeed now mastered the genre and this novel is as tightly plotted, action packed, and bristling with detail as the work of Vince Flynn and Brad Thor. In this novel, renegade billionaire Emanuel Skorzeny, after having escaped justice for the depredations he unleashed in the previous novel, has been reduced to hiding out in jurisdictions which have no extradition treaty with the United States. NSA covert agent “Devlin” is on his trail when a coordinated series of terrorist attacks strike New York City. Feckless U.S. President Jeb Tyler decides to leave New York's police Counter-Terrorism Unit (CTU) to fend for itself to avoid the débâcle being laid at his feet, but allows Devlin to be sent in covertly to track down and take out the malefactors. Devlin assumes his “angel of death” persona and goes to work, eventually becoming also the guardian angel of the head of CTU, old school second generation Irish cop Francis Xavier Byrne. Devlin and the CTU eventually help the perpetrators achieve the martyrdom to which they aspire, but not before massive damage is inflicted upon the city and one terrorist goal accomplished which may cause even more in the future. How this fits into Skorzeny's evil schemes still remains to be discovered, as the mastermind's plot seems to involve not only mayhem on the streets of Manhattan but also the Higgs boson. The action and intrigue are leavened by excursions into cryptography (did you know about the Poe Cryptographic Challenge?), the music of Edward Elgar, and Devlin's developing relationship with the enigmatic Iranian expatriate “Maryam”. This is an entertaining and satisfying thriller, and I'm planning to read the next episode, Shock Warning, in due time.
- Walsh, Michael. Hostile Intent. New York: Pinnacle Books, 2009. ISBN 978-0-7860-2042-3.
-
Michael Walsh is a versatile and successful writer who
has been a Moscow correspondent and music critic for
Time magazine, written a novel which is a
sequel to Casablanca, four books about
classical music, and a screenplay for the Disney Channel
which was the highest rated original movie on the channel
at the time. Two of his books have been New York Times
bestsellers, and his gangster novel
And All the Saints
won an American Book Award in 2004. This novel is the
first of a projected series of five. The second,
Early Warning,
was released in September 2010.
In the present novel, the author turns to the genre of the
contemporary thriller, adopting the template created by
Tom Clancy,
and used with such success by authors such as
Vince Flynn
and
Brad Thor:
a loner, conflicted agent working for a shadowy organisation, sent to
do the dirty work on behalf of the highest levels of the government
of the United States. In this case, the protagonist is known only as
“Devlin” (although he assumes a new alias and persona
every few chapters), whose parents were killed in a terrorist attack
at the Rome airport in 1985 and has been raised as a covert instrument
of national policy by a military man who has risen to become the head
of the
National
Security Agency (NSA).
Devlin works for the
Central Security
Service, a branch of the NSA which, in the novel, retains its original
intent of being “Branch 4” of the armed forces, able to exploit
information resources and execute covert operations outside the scope
of conventional military actions.
The book begins with a gripping description of a
Beslan-like
school hostage attack in the United States in which Devlin is activated
to take down the perpetrators. After achieving a mostly successful
resolution, he begins to suspect that the entire event was simply a
ruse to draw him into the open so that he could be taken down by his
enemies. This supposition is confirmed, at least in his own justifiably
paranoid mind, by further terrorist strikes in Los Angeles and London,
which raise the stakes and further expose his identity and connections.
This is a story which starts strong but then sputters out as it
unfolds. The original taut narrative of the school hostage crisis
turns into a mush with a shadowy supervillain who is kind of an
evil George Soros (well, I mean an even more evil George Soros),
a feckless and inexperienced U.S. president (well, at least that
could never happen!), and Devlin, the über paranoid loner suddenly
betting everything on a chick he last met in a shoot-out in Paris.
Thrillers are supposed to thrill, but if set in the contemporary world
or the near future (as is this book—the fall of Mugabe in Zimbabwe
is mentioned, but everything is pretty much the same as the present), they're
expected to be plausible as regards the technology used and
the behaviour of the characters. It just doesn't do to have the hero, in
a moment of crisis, when attacked by ten thousand AK-47 wielding fanatics
from all directions, pull out his ATOMIC SPACE GUN and mow them down
with a single burst.
But that's pretty much what happens here. I'll have to go behind the
spoiler curtain to get into the details, so I'll either see you there
or on the other side if you've decided to approach this novel
freshly without my nattering over details.
Spoiler warning: Plot and/or ending details follow.It's a tangled, muddled mess. It has its moments, but there isn't the building toward a climax and then the resolution one expects from a thriller. None of the characters are really admirable, and the author's policy preferences (with which I largely agree) are exhibited far too blatantly, as opposed to being woven into the plot. The author, accomplished in other genres, may eventually master the thriller, but I doubt I'll read any of the sequels to find out for myself.
- We are asked to believe that a sitting U.S. president would order two members of his Secret Service detail to commit a cold blooded murder in order to frame a senator and manipulate his reelection campaign, and that the agents would carry out the murder. This is simply absurd.
- As the story develops we learn that the shadowy “Branch 4” for which Devlin believes he is working does not, in fact, exist, and that Devlin is its sole agent, run by the director of NSA. Now Devlin has back-door access to all U.S. intelligence assets and databases and uses them throughout. How plausible is it that he wouldn't have figured this out himself?
- Some people have cell phones: Devlin has a Hell phone. In chapter 7 we're treated to a description of Devlin's Black Telephone, which is equipped with “advanced voice-recognition software”, a fingerprint scanner in the receiver, and a retinal scanner in the handset. “If any of these elements were not sequenced within five seconds, the phone would self-destruct in a fireball of shrapnel, killing any unauthorized person unlucky enough to have picked it up.” Would you trust a government-supplied telephone bomb to work with 100% reliability? What if your stack of dossiers topples over and knocks off the receiver?
- In several places “logarithm” is used where “algorithm” is intended. Gadgetry is rife with urban legends such as the computer virus which causes a hard drive to melt.
- In chapter 12 the phone rings and Devlin “spoke into a Blu-Ray mouthpiece as he answered”. Blu-ray is an optical disc storage format; Bluetooth is the wireless peripheral technology. Besides, would an operative obsessed with security to the level of paranoia use a wireless headset with dubious anti-eavesdropping measures?
- The coup de grace of the series of terrorist attacks is supposed to be an electromagnetic pulse (EMP) attack against the United States, planned to knock out all electronics, communications, and electrical power in the eastern part of the country. The attack consists of detonating an ex-Soviet nuclear weapon raised to the upper atmosphere by a weather balloon launched from a ship off the East Coast. Where to begin? Well, first of all, at the maximum altitude reachable by a weather balloon, the mean free path of the gamma rays from the detonation through the atmosphere would be limited, as opposed to the unlimited propagation distance from an explosion in space well above the atmosphere. This would mean that any ionisation of atoms in the atmosphere would be a local phenomenon, which would reduce the intensity and scope of the generated pulse. Further, the electromagnetic pulse cannot propagate past the horizon, so even if a powerful pulse were generated at the altitude of a balloon, it wouldn't propagate far enough to cause a disaster all along the East Coast.
- In the assault on Clairvaux Prison, is it conceivable that an experienced special forces operator would take the mother of a hostage and her young son along aboard the helicopter gunship leading the strike?
- After the fight in the prison, archvillain Skorenzy drops through a trap door and escapes to a bolt-hole, and at the end of the novel is still at large and presumed to be continuing his evil schemes. But his lair is inside a French maximum security prison! How does he get away? Say what you like about the French military, when it comes to terrorists they're deadly serious, right up there with the Mossad. Would a prison that housed Carlos the Jackal have a tunnel which would allow Skorenzy to saunter out? Would French officials allow the man who blew up a part of Los Angeles and brought down the London Eye with a cruise missile free passage?
Spoilers end here. - Walsh, Michael. Shock Warning. New York: Pinnacle Books, 2011. ISBN 978-0-7860-2412-4.
-
This is the third novel in the author's “Devlin”
series of thrillers. When I read the first,
Hostile Intent (September 2010), I described it
as a “tangled, muddled mess” and concluded that the author
“may eventually master the thriller, but I doubt I'll read any
of the sequels to find out for myself”. Well, I did eventually
read the sequel, Early Warning (January 2012), which I
enjoyed very much, and concluded that the author was well on the
path to being a grandmaster of the techno-thriller genre.
Then we have this book, the conclusion to the Devlin trilogy. Here
the author decides to “go large” and widen the arena from
regional terrorist strikes to a global apocalyptic clash of civilisations
end-times scenario. The result is an utter flop. First of all, this
novel shouldn't be read by anybody who hasn't read the previous
two books—you won't have the slightest idea who the characters
are, the backstory which has brought them to their present points, or
what motivates them to behave as they do. Or maybe I can simplify
the last sentence to say “This novel shouldn't be read by
anybody”—it's that bad.
There is little more I can say which would not be spoilers
for either this book or the series, so let us draw the curtain.
Spoiler warning: Plot and/or ending details follow.The key thing about a techno-thriller is that the technology should be plausible and that it should be thrilling. This novel fails by both criteria. The key conceit, that a laser operated by a co-opted employee of CERN on the Côte d'Azur could project lifelike holographic images of the Blessed Virgin Mary and the Prophet Mohammed by bouncing them off the lunar ranging retroreflectors placed on the lunar surface is laugh-out-loud absurd. A moment's calculation of the energy required to return a visible signal to the Earth will result in howls of laughter, and that's before you consider that holograms don't work anything like the author presumes they do. Our high-end NSA and special forces heroes communicate using a “double Playfair cipher”. This is a digraph substitution cipher which can be broken in milliseconds by modern computers. Danny brings the MH-6H Little Bird “just a few feet off the high desert floor”, whereupon Devlin “rappelled down, hit the ground, and started running” if it were just a few feet, why didn't he just step off the chopper, or why didn't Danny land it?I could go on and on, but I won't because I didn't care enough about this story to critique it in detail. There is a constant vertigo as the story line cuts back and forth among characters we've met in the first two novels, many of who play only peripheral roles in this story. There is an entire subplot about a manipulative contender for the U.S. presidency which fades out and goes nowhere. This is a techno-thriller in which the tech is absurd and the plot induces chuckles rather than thrills.Spoilers end here.
