Spycatcher [Mass Market Paperback]

Will Cochrane is a spy on the MI6 payroll. But not just any old pedestrian spy. He is "Spartan", Britain's only super-spy. And he's good. He's very, very good.

MI6 and the CIA know that Iran is plotting a large terrorist event, but don't have details. Cochrane starts with a small lead and is soon on the trail of Megiddo, who runs not only Iran's terrorist operations, but has a finger on nearly every terrorist activity in the world. Time is very much of the essence, and Cochrane zips across the globe, slowly unravelling an incredibly elaborate scheme.

Things move fast, and Cochrane is brilliant but not infallible, which makes everything far more interesting. He's sort of a modern day James Bond, but less debonair and more callous. The plotting here is devious and believable, so much so that Megiddo could well have been based on a real person. I've been to some of the locales, and they are all authentically described. As hair-on-fire spy thrillers go, this has a lot going for it.

My main problem is with Cochrane. Much like Clive Cussler's "Dirk Pitt" character, he absorbs damage that would cripple any normal human, and keeps right on going. Early on, he's shot three times, with exit wounds through the abdomen. The next day he's up and walking, two days later he's moving at nearly full speed. Another time he's shot through the shoulder, seriously enough that his left arm is hanging uselessly by his side. A day later, he uses his left hand to strangle a strong man to death. He's about one step away from being a T-1000 cyborg unit, and that detracts from an otherwise tight story.

This book is just a hair short of being great. Make Cochrane more believably human and this series will be unstoppable. Count me in for the next few installments; I can't wait to see where this is all headed!

That's my plot summary, right there.

Author Dunn may have a background in intelligence, but he writes the kind of story I'd expect to see from a testosterone-raddled teenager, or maybe from Marvel Comics.

First, as many others have mentioned, there's the opening of the story that sees our hero, Will Cochrane, riddled in the gut with three bullets. Not only does that barely slow him down, but he's able to continue on with his mission, spending hours in airplanes, carrying on all his normal duties, beating people up, killing other people, etcetera. I have to wonder how much of a superman he is when he's NOT suffering gunshot wounds.

Bring on the kryptonite.

Chapter 13 is a great example of the idiocy of this book. Cochrane goes to the home of an NSA officer - to whom Dunn doesn't even bother giving a name - breaks in, beats the guy up, and threatens to kill his family. This unnamed character is a LOYAL American intelligence analyst. Why does he do this? Because he's trying to determine if an NSA intelligence source named "Hubble" has been possibly compromised.

He doesn't go through channels at the NSA; he doesn't approach the guy as a loyal compatriot. He beats the snot out of him for absolutely no reason at all. Then, when he's done and ready to leave, he threatens the guy and his wife and kids, saying, "Do this, and you and your loved ones get to live. Fail, and everything you love will die."

What the hell? This is supposed to be believable? Why wouldn't the guy report this to his bosses at the NSA immediately? It was so ridiculous I laughed out loud. This is the kind of puerile nonsense you expect from teenagers, as I said, or maybe a Vin Deisel movie.

Cochrane has the uncanny ability to take two or three international flights a day, simply to attend meetings. How does he do it? Are there no security lines in European airports? Don't those pesky - or maybe not so pesky - bullet wounds EVER bother him?

Apparently not, to both questions.

It goes on like that throughout the book. Super-duper-spy Cochrane taking on impossible odds and beating them every time in the most unlikely and unbelievable ways. Characters that are even less than two-dimensional, like the NSA analyst who didn't even rate a name.

Why would Lee Child and Jeffrey Deaver (on the Amazon product page) hawk this book? I can only guess that neither actually read the darned thing, and both were star-struck by a guy who has an actual background in intelligence. But being in intelligence and being able to write about it are two completely different things.

Obviously.

We have this British tough guy, code name Spartan.

For a moment, pretend his name is Biggles. It will help you understand how dumb this book is.

Biggles starts by protecting his Iranian source, in New York City for no good reason except the author probably cannot describe Tehran, from Iranian hit squads -- dozens of well-armed Iranian hit-spies in the Big Apple. What a sensible set-up.

He shoots 8-12 of them, and his compatriots, Able, Baker, and Charlie, or shall we call them Apple, Butthead, and Chump, are also killed. (Nobody ever mentions them again, because who cares about dead British agents.) He kills his Iranian source rather than letting him be captured, and as he falls into unconsciousness, he notes his three wounds, including a gaping hole in his abdomen.

Biggles wakes up the next morning feeling a bit stiff, but OK. Because a sorta doctor from the CIA has "fixed him". And because Spartan-Biggles is too damn tough to let three bullet wounds slow him down for a freaking minute. He pops a few pills and begins emoting.

After a strange, wooden, blocky conversation with CIA guy Patrick, he flies home. During the conversation, we learn that "Spartan-Biggles" is the one British agent code named Spartan, the product of a training process so tough that IF you survive it, you get to be the one guy named Biggles..... err, Spartan.

Yes, this makes sense. Sure. It takes several hundred thousand dollars to train one special forces trooper, so how about creating a training program that takes several of these guys, and trains them so hard that they DIE, and if one happens to survive, lets call him Biggles and make him a super-agent. By becoming Biggles, I think he gets $11 more per week.

As we progress, we find that our Biggles has a great habit. He often looks around the room, at all the people, and notes to himself and to them, that he might just have to kill them all, and of course, he could, and they know he could, because he is Biggles, the super-tough guy. When a book fails to note that several armed men can kill one armed man, even one with a cool code name, the book has lost touch with reality.

Biggles is no George Smiley. The conceit of this book is that Biggles is such a spymaster, that his skills will be unique in catching spies. Err... no, the plotting does not build, there are no layers, there are lots of shootings and knifings.

This book continues on this adolescent route, with a leaden hero who is laughable, who survives anything, kills dozens, and is a BAD comic book hero. Most of these adventure type novels have their traces of adolesence... Jack Reacher wanders the world a bit too much. Jack Ryan goes from analyst to shooter with no pause. But this guy lacks the tiniest bit of realism, the layer of connection to what being a tough guy is really all about (and it is not cartoon violence and walking away from gaping holes in your abdomen).

The writing is blocky, the dialogue is so bad it makes me giggle, the posturing lead character is such an ass that somebody would have hit him on the head with a shovel when his back was turned, years ago, as he was noting to the room that he just might have to kill them all. It becomes clear that the author is one of those guys whose toughest real life experience was a paper cut, who barely understands how to fight off a nap, and has no clear sense of how real people conduct themselves in a world of violence. I mean, the author has "MI6" experience -- did he shoot 8 guys in Central Park on a counter-terrorism operation? If not, then why does he make his hero live out such teen fantasies?

The author should have asked himself... if I called this guy Biggles instead of Spartan, would it work? And the answer would have been yes, because the book is a farce.