Bestseller Griffin's ponderous third Presidential Agent novel picks up where the previous entry, The Hostage, left off, following U.S. Army Maj. Carlos "Charley" Castillo, a troubleshooter who takes orders directly from the president, as he fumbles about in South America and Europe. Castillo and his crew of specialists are trying to figure out who ordered the murder of American diplomat Jean-Paul Lorimer, who was shot to death in Uruguay while under suspicion of various international misdeeds, including a shady food-for-oil conspiracy in Iraq. Long stretches of dialogue and description come across more as showcases for Griffin's knowledge than as solid narrative, while Castillo and his cohorts never rise beyond their assigned roles. Fans will miss the more captivating heroes of Griffin's Brotherhood of War or the Corps series. Author tour. (Jan.) Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.
This third entry in Griffin's exciting and timely "Presidential Agent" series begins literally minutes after the end of the previous novel, The Hostage, and again features the irreverent but highly capable Charley Castillo and all the other ensemble characters. The plot here focuses on the UN "oil for food" scandal and the murderers who will stop at nothing to protect themselves and their own national interests. Castillo is so busy chasing the bad guys that he almost forgets his girlfriend, who's recuperating in a hospital. Oops. Exhibiting a thorough knowledge of how the government and the military work (or don't work) and a detailed knowledge of multitudes of weapons systems, Griffin offers another novel that is fast-paced, exciting, and great fun to read. Griffin's loyal readers will hope that more will be coming soon. Recommended for all popular fiction collections. [See Prepub Alert, LJ 9/1/06.]-Robert Conroy, Warren, MI Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.
Griffin returns to chronicle the international adventures of heroic presidential special agent Charley Castillo (The Hostage, 2006). Too modest and too rich to be just another rampaging Ollie North, Major C.G. "Charley," polyglot love child of a German newspaper heiress and an even richer Texas aviator, has been charged by his doting president with the formation of a special-operations group answering only to the White House. The president wants Charley to clear up the mess left behind when he and his ragtag band of straight-shooting marines, honest CIA operatives, brainy Asian F.B.I. agents and their admiring Argentine opposite numbers located and almost snatched the perfidious high-level U.N. bureaucrat who absconded to rural Uruguay with 16 million dollars rightfully belonging to an international ring of oil-for-food swindlers. The snatch of the bureaucrat had been foiled by a black-clad gang of seemingly unidentifiable "Ninjas" armed with untraceable weapons, one of whom took out the bureaucrat even as Charley was reaching for him. The Ninjas were all wiped out, but the oil-for-food thieves want their money back and they want equally to eliminate anyone with clues about their identity, especially elderly Hungarian man-about-town and ace reporter Eric Kocian, a favorite of Charley's. Armed with the disputed 16 million bucks snatched from the late bureaucrat's secret accounts, girded with a promotion to Lt. Colonel and staffed with the best office administrator on the planet, Charley rounds up his troops and swears them into the new unit and off they fly in Charley's Gulfstream, back and forth from Argentina to Germany to Hungary to Texas to Argentina to Uruguay, accompanied on much ofthe trip by Kocian's huge and adorable Flemish sheepdog, until they at last clear up most of the mysteries, leaving just enough unsolved for a sequel. Notable mostly for the digs at a CIA agent remarkably similar to Valerie Plame.
If you’ve been hunting for a fast-paced thriller, pick up this third installment in Griffin’s Presidential Agent series. It starts seconds after The Hostage ends, but you needn’t have listened to the latter to fully enjoy this. Having thwarted a nuclear disaster and uncovered a figure in an international scandal involving Iraqi oil, presidential operative Charley Castillo now hunts for the culprits who committed two related murders. You must admire Dick Hill’s smooth, exciting performance as Castillo flits from country to country on his quest. Hill gracefully transitions from character to character, whether German, French, Russian, Spanish, or Hungarian. They all sound authentic when spoken by Hill. He is also a master of the frequent military diction that Griffin’s characters are known for. A.L.H. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award © AudioFile 2007, Portland, Maine
