Ben Coes

Grownups don't giggle

St. Martin's Press has recently send me a few of these Ben Coes books and I must say that for absurd paramilitary thrillers, they aren’t bad. Mr. Coes can't write women characters at all, but his big strong male hero Dewey Andreas is not an ogre and the books do not offend my excessively liberal sensibilities. The action sequences are terrific. But we are faced with really truly lame women. Fortunately, there aren't very many of them, so cringing is kept to a show more minimum.

Here the Batman plot of isolating Gotham is taken a lot farther. The bad guys blow up the tunnels into New York City and block the bridges. They take hostages and make impossible demands. Dewey and his buds (male and female) act with great cunning and skill to save the day.

But hey Ben: Real women don't giggle.

I received a review copy of "The Island" by Ben Coes from St. Martin's Press through NetGalley.com. show less

When they talk about fast-paced, adrenaline-filled nonstop action, Eye for an Eye by Ben Coes is the type of book they are talking about. It’s a little (ok a lot) over the top, but man is it fun.

Dewey Andreas is a great action hero. He’s impossibly handsome and incredibly good at his job. When his fiance is accidentally killed by Chinese agents during an attempt on Dewey’s life, a fiance who happens to be the US National Security Advisor, it sets Dewey on a mission to kill the head of show more Chinese intelligence. A mission that will take him back and forth across the globe leaving a trail of destruction behind him.

This is the kind of book where you check your critical thinking at the door and just relax and have fun. A lot of the action strains believability, as well as the laws of physics, but you are so invested in the characters and story, you don’t really care. The bad guys are ruthless and evil, the good guys are determined and on the side of angels, but they are not one-dimensional.

Coes does an incredible job of fleshing out his characters and making them three dimensional, while also delivering an incredible page-turning action filled book. This book starts fast and stays fast. When you get used to the pace, Coes kicks it up another notch. There is a car chase scene on the highways of Portugal that has the pages turning so fast they almost catch fire. Coes’ style of short passages and alternating perspectives really works to ratchet the action and the tension up.

The story uses China’s dominance in both the financial market as well as electronic surveillance and hacking as key parts of the plot, which gives an anchor of believability to the story. Coes is a talented writer and Dewey Andreas is a great action hero. I look forward to more entries in this series. A great summer read and a top-notch thriller. Highly recommended.

I was fortunate to receive an advance copy of this book. show less

Pakistan has elected a new leader: a radical cleric named Omar El-Khayab, who is determined to spread Islam throughout the world by any means necessary--including violent jihad. A series of relatively minor events cause tension between India and Pakistan to escalate, until Pakistan drops a nuclear bomb on an Indian city. Now, America must find a way to resolve this conflict before it becomes a full-scale nuclear war between the India and Pakistan, which would doubtless draw their allies, show more America and China, into conflict with one another, leading to the bloodiest war the world has ever seen.

The only plan that has a hope of defusing the situation without the loss of millions of lives is to forcibly remove El-Khayab from power, and install a new leader who is willing to make peace with India. The only man with a hope of succeeding is Dewey Andreas. Unfortunately, he is in Australia, trying to avoid being killed by terrorists seeking revenge. Somehow, he must escape them, get to Pakistan, and accomplish the coup d'etat--in only two days.

Coup d'Etat by Ben Coes is a thriller, to be published in September 2011. Its story, and particularly the buildup to the war, is surprisingly believable: tensions escalate as a result of minor, but realistic, confrontations and misunderstandings, and the major figures are realistically bound by political considerations, which leads to the proposal of the unorthodox solution which gives the book its title.

The story's verisimilitude is Coup d'Etat's best feature; it doesn't fare so well in other respects. The realistic buildup of tensions between Pakistan and India come at the price of making the first hundred pages slow and uninteresting. The dialogue and narration are often stilted and filled with jarring use of idiom and reference to particular brand names. Worse, Coes seems unable to write more than a few pages about Dewey without admiring his manly physique and cold attitude. When people meet Dewey for the first time, we're assured that they are in awe of his muscles and intimidating presence.

This emphasis on masculinity is detrimental to the book in general, and to the reader's sympathy for the protagonists in particular. The protagonists kill a number of people without any compunction, and sometimes with relish. Dewey enjoys keeping his opponents alive just long enough to see panic and defeat in their eyes, before killing them.

If you can stomach the praise of masculinity and militarism, and are willing to wade through the first quarter of the book until it picks up, Coup d'Etat has a pretty good story to tell. With these caveats, I'd cautiously recommend it to readers looking for a thriller examining potential conflict in the Middle East.

Disclosure: This review is based on a free advance copy of the book. show less

Let's summarize: a gifted but troubled former Special Ops soldier with authority issues is called out of retirement by an honest member of a corrupt Washington bureaucracy to organize a clandestine operation of immense danger against cruel and swarthy opponents. Mayhem ensues, and the spillage of many bodily fluids. Women find him irresistible after the mission's success, as they did before, but he wasn't having any of it then.

This describes something like the minimum conditions of the genre show more (political thriller? military thriller?), which has dug a rut as deep as the western novel during the Louis L'Amour era. We read them because the template reinforces a view we want to hang on to about the world, or about America, or about ourselves, though, so these books serve their purpose if they meet the minimum conditions with brisk pacing, original plots, and believable action. This one meets those requirements just fine, thank you. show less