From Publishers Weekly
The troops of the small Special Ops force in this latest novel by Bond (
Red Phoenix, etc.) spend about equal time bantering with each other and blowing up stuff: buildings, vehicles and even thugs who stand in their way. Aside from its inherent entertainment value (which is considerable), this is a good formula because it allows Bond and coauthor DeFelice to smoothly fold in an enormous amount of exposition and to introduce, over the course of a hundred or so short chapters, the individual members of Joint Services Special Demands Project Office, known to insiders as simply the Team, for the novel is the kickoff of a projected series about the new war on terror. Smooth, shrewd Bob Ferguson leads them, engineering their escape from a tricky trap in Kyrgyzstan early on. The MacGuffin: a planned meeting with Russian wheeler dealer Alex Sheremetev in Kyrgyzstan goes awry when Ferg finds Sheremetev's murdered corpse. Before you can say
frameup, local police have arrested Team member Jack "Guns" Young (a Marine and language expert) for the crime. It's up to Ferg, Connors (the old man and explosives expert) and Rankin (the young hothead) to rescue Guns and find the real killer-and that's just for starters. Back in Washington, Corrine Alston, chief adviser to the new president, disdains the maverick modus operandi of the Team and Ferg in particular, so much so that she flies to Russia to confront and control him. Her slow journey from skeptic to supporter is the novel's most entertaining and mainstream plot thread, the reader on her shoulder as she's immersed in the rough and tumble adventures of the Team. This is a solid series debut.
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From Booklist
Bond, the author of a string of best-selling techno-thrillers, has achieved the sort of status that lets a writer stick his own name right in the title of his book. This is the first installment of a series of novels spotlighting twenty-first-century warfare: wars fought not by armies, but by small groups of highly trained experts, in other words, by intelligence not firepower. At the center of this novel is the First Team, a small unit created by the CIA to "address unconventional threats in an unconventional way" and currently operating undercover in the former Soviet Union, tracking radioactive waste that could, in the hands of a particularly clever terrorist, be used to wreak havoc on an unsuspecting world. The team is an entirely fictional creation, but Bond and cowriter DeFelice (who's also collaborated with Stephen Coonts and Dale Brown) combine research and imagination to make the whole premise seem completely plausible. The team itself--a CIA officer, a marine, and two Special Forces commandos--is a lively quartet of characters, trading witticisms and good-natured insults as they try to save the world from an evil villain. In fact, Bond may finally have learned how to create characters who feel like people, not stick figures or functions of an overly complicated plot. Fans of his muscular techno-thrillers will thoroughly enjoy this new novel, and clamor for more First Team adventures. Readers who've tried a Bond novel, and failed to find much to enjoy, ought to give this one a try; they'll be pleasantly surprised.
David PittCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
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