America: A Jake Grafton Novel (Mass Market Paperback)

But the writing is just sloppy. The same piece of information is frequently delivered twice in the same scene, as though the author decided to move it and then forgot to delete the original mention. He refers to characters by their full names incongruously and often, sometimes more than once in a paragraph when the characters have already been introduced. (Occasionally they've been introduced more than once, as though the author had forgotten he'd already done it). Mystifying acronyms show up all over and aren't defined until later, but the NSA is for some reason referred to by its full name throughout the book. These seem like minor details, but they're distracting; to me, they disrupt the flow of the narrative.

If you're not a writer, these things probably won't bother you. It really is a good story, and I'd love to see it made into a movie. Coonts, unlike Tom Clancy, describes technology in just enough detail to make it interesting, but not with the sort of excruciating obsession with minutiae that makes Clancy's books too bloated for me to bother with. Coonts' description of the sub <i>America's</i> control room is so vivid I can picture myself there. The characters are surprisingly believable for this sort of book, although some could do with a little more detail.

But as a writer... well, by page 20 I was seriously considering marking the paperback up in red ink and mailing it back to the publisher with my resume and rates.

When the going gets tough, the tough guys (and their wives) go for a luxury cruise? No way!

Until the last three chapters I really liked "America". OK, the plot is a bit farfetched, involving hackers meddling with the launch of a super-advanced military satellite and a CIA-trained team of Russians and East Germans stealing a likewise super-advanced US Navy submarine named "America". But if you can swallow the plot the story is very exciting, and the characterizations of the people in the book is fairly good.

The submarine "America" and its advanced equipment and weapons are the real stars of the show. I especially loved the descriptions of the havoc created by the Tomahawk cruise missiles with new EMP (electromagnetic pulse) warheads, the attempts by two F-16 Fighting Falcons to shoot down the cruise missiles, and the underwater battle between "America" and two Los Angeles class submarines. At times like this Stephen Coonts is even better than Tom Clancy.

There is also a whole array of bad guys who you can love to hate. The one who's presented best is the Russian captain Vladimir Kolnikov, the leader of the team that steals "America" and then inflicts major damage on the USA. Zelda Hudson, the American hacker who finds it only slightly challenging to re-program a satellite launch or to get into any of the Pentagon's weapons systems, is also a cool customer whose services are available to the highest bidder.

Unfortunately, the two top bad guys, the Frenchmen Antoine Jouany and Willi Schlegel, never get much coverage, remaining simply "the nasty Europeans" who want to challenge the dominance of the USA. It would have been nice if they got to play a larger role.

But then comes the last three chapters, and major disappointment. Willi Schlegel happens to own a luxury cruise ship and decides to use it to rendezvous with "America" off the coast of Portugal. This is totally crazy - what bad guy in his right mind would involve hundreds of paying passengers and hundreds of non-combatant crew members in his criminal activities?

Even crazier, the good guys then decide to get aboard the luxury cruise ship pretending to be ordinary passengers and they bring their wives along to provide cover. Of course the bad guys are on top of the situation and the next thing we know the good guys and their wives are being held at gunpoint! Is this dumb or what?

I don't know how you feel about your wife (or husband), but deliberately and unnecessarily putting her (or him) in harm's way when going up against cold-blooded killers is not my idea of proper behavior.

In summary, an exciting techno-thriller that's great until it breaches the reader's credulity when the action in the last three chapters moves to a luxury cruise ship and the good guys bring their wives along for the final confrontation. That twist in the plot is too much to swallow, and spoils the whole book.