Review by Jeremy Taylor

What do you get when you cross the high-powered, cutthroat world of politics with the adrenaline-laced, live-fast-die-young world of extreme sports? What do you get when you mix a presidential campaign with professional rock climbing? What do you get when you mix international intrigue with heights, avalanches, and murder? You get Free Fall by Kyle Mills.

Kyle Mills seems to be quite an up-and-comer in the political/action genre. His books thus far have been met with high critical acclaim and high sales. His fast-paced action combined with thoughtful political insights have generated praise from Tom Clancy, Alan Folsom, Rush Limbaugh, and many others. In Free Fall, Mills sends his hero, FBI agent Mark Beamon, on a global chase that includes trekking across frozen glaciers, dangling precariously over vast precipices, escaping a grungy prison in Thailand, and attending high-level meetings in Washington, D.C. Needless to say, the scope of this book is huge.

Yet Mills manages to pull it off without leaving the reader feeling overwhelmed (a literary sin of which even the venerable Tom Clancy has been guilty at times).

When a governmental peon accidentally discovers damning political secrets and makes the mistake of attempting to use them for personal gain, he meets with a brutal and untimely end. His ex-girlfriend, Darby Moore, a world-renowned rock-climber and extreme-sports enthusiast, is implicated in the murder. When Darby escapes with the evidence, a manhunt ensues. The only problem: with her abilities and experience, Darby is capable of vanishing into virtually any extreme environment on the planet.

Embattled FBI agent Mark Beamon is tagged to track down and apprehend Darby. He quickly finds that conventional investigative techniques will not work in this pursuit. But as he gets closer and closer to his quarry, he finds himself questioning the official story. Is Darby Moore really a murderer, or is she simply a convenient scapegoat? The answer may well determine the future of some of America’s most notable politicians. And Beamon is the only one who can find the truth.

Mills is able to craft his characters in a way that makes them believable and sympathetic. The one exception is presidential advisor and arch-villain Roland Peck, who seemed almost cartoonish in his infamy. Yet I found myself caring about the protagonists and wanting to know what would happen to them. The winning combination of skillful characterization and white-knuckle action prose make Free Fall a success.

There is some violence in the book, but the author for the most part finds ways to “tell” the violent scenes more than “show” them, a tricky endeavor that works well for him. There is no sexual content. The only other objectionable material is a general worldview that views premarital cohabitation as normal and appropriate (hardly a surprise in twenty-first-century America) and the depiction of high-ranking politicians as unimaginably corrupt (again, not much of a stretch for the imagination, unfortunately). All in all, this is a very entertaining book by a highly skilled writer. I will certainly be reading more books by Kyle Mills.

(http://www.cerebralexchange.com/books...) ( )

Four friends set out one day to explore a cave they've heard about. After a scary run-in with a rattlesnake, the boys become lost and have to use their wits to get out alive. ( )