Havoc

Good experience. Book was in the advertised condition and arrived in a timely manner. Seller recommended.

Throw together spies, nationalistic plans for world domination, as well as a large dose of nanotech, and you have R. J. Pineiro's book Havoc. I enjoyed the story itself, but the writer almost appears to be trying *too* hard to be clever... Tom Grant is an ex-CIA agent who got hung out to dry on an operation in Singapore. Rather than fight back, he retires to a central American beach to live out his life in solitude. Unfortunately for him, he is being recruited to help the agency solve a break-in at USN, a nanotech firm (government-owned) that has military hardware that others would kill for. Grant's old boss was thought to be dead, but indications are that he really went rogue and helped lead the break-in. Grant is teamed up with an attractive agent to track down the stolen gear, find the rogue agent, and also determine who's behind all of this. CyberWerke is the leading competitor of USN, and its leader has a shadowy past and definite plans to put Germany in the position of world leader. Using nanotech, he's able to stage a near-coup of the German legislature and position himself as the new leader of the country. The only thing that can stop him is Grant's team or the stolen nanotech device that's escaped into the wild, thrown off its artificial intelligence constraints, and deems the entire human race as a threat to its existence. There's a lot going on here, and I really did enjoy the plotline. The futuristic nanotech devices allow the author to get the characters into quite a few unusual situations, and the cyberintelligence of the escaped device was rather cool. Perhaps not realistic, but cool... The only problem I had with the novel was the author's style of writing. The Grant character is supposed to be a "cool" agent, and everyone is a "cat". And I don't think I've ever read a story where the author had so many nicknames for his bodyparts and intimate activities... "sharing bodily fluids", "long-dormant one-eyed monster", "third leg", "old mustard road without K-Y", "hide the salami", etc, etc, etc. And we're not even up to page 25 yet. It was OK in moderation, but it got annoying pretty quickly. Had I not enjoyed the storyline as much as I did, I'd likely have been much more harsh in my assessment. But he really does need to just relax and let the story and characters work... Worth reading for some mind-candy entertainment, but it's too bad that style hindered the substance...

A character from a previous Pineiro book Tom Grant returns in this thriller.Grant has been forced out of the CIA and has had plastic surgery to alter his looks.He has retired to El Salvador to hide out.He is located by Rachel Muratani who talks him out of retirement.The two of them are supposed to locate Troy Savage.After near assassination by the forces of evil they discover that Savage is attempting to find two moles in the CIA. The other villains in this story are the two heads of CyberWerke a huge industrial firm located in Germany.Rolf Hartmann and Christoff Deppe are two sons of dead Nazis who have created their working capital from Hitler's gold and diamonds given to them by their fathers.They have hired outlaw arms merchant Rem Vlachko to steal a nanoassembler from USN.The nano- assembler escapes escapes from Vlachko threating to kill all of mankind.It falls upon Mike Ryan to stop the nanoassembler.In the meantime CyberWerke is trying to take over the world.All of these factors make for an exciting read.I have never read a bad R.J. Pineiro book.