The Icarus Agenda

Finished this book today. It was a nice read that took me a long time to finish (used it as a bedtime book).
I liked the story, I liked the whole atmosphere. It was a Ludlum like I expected. Many storylines, lots of characters. A plausible plot, for the most part.
A few action scenes (chapters) were less to my liking because they were too much, too good to be true or whatever term you want to use for it.

But the story isn't finished yet, even though I've read the last page. So hopefully I can get the rest in another book, although I don't count on it. This book is not part of a series.

Some years ago I had a Robert Ludlum phase where I pretty well devoured everything that he had written and on the whole I enjoyed the vast majority of them particularily the Bourne trilogy. This was the first book of his that I have read since that period and on the whole I felt that there was little change in the style but for me this book was just a little over long.

A secret group called Inver Brass fed up with corruption at the highest political levels of Government decide that they need someone to run for Vice President. They decide that Evan Kendrick a freshman Congressman from a rural backwater of Colorado is their man. A year earliar he had gone to Oman to help in the release of 200+ American hostages and to bring down a man show more calling himself the Mahdi whom Kendrick believes, correctly, has funded the hostage takers and caused the deaths of virtually all his company staff some years previous. Inver Brass leak details of the successful Omani mission to the national press and so up Kendrick's profile with the American public. It is the start of their campaign to get him on the 'ticket'. However, another group, these backers of the present Vice President, want to stop Kendrick. So the battlelines are drawn.

Kendrick was a well thought out character as were most of the others involved but in the end I just felt that the second half of the book was not as strong as the first. That said, the idea that an untrained politician would just be dropped into an Arab country and solve a hostage situation that had baffled the spy services of many other countries took an almighty leap of imagination. However, to believe that Arab and Jewish agents would and could work together to solve terrorism was just too big of a leap for me. Also the idea that one man, admittedly an honest one, could solve all off democracy's problem was a bit of a stretch as well.In the end the second half of the book became an exercise in wishful thinking for me. Which was a real shame as it had the makings of a really good book.

The book was first published in 1988 so the plot was a little dated but that was only to be expected.Ultimately I felt that the ending was just too neat and that the book had been written with an eye on a movie deal as it tried to tick off all the boxes to make it appeal to a jingoistic American audience. A decent read but not a great one IMHO. show less

Just stick to Ludlum from the 80s. His later stuff ranges from just OK to terrible.

I finally finished. Started it when I was 17 years old and finished it at 43. Always liked it but always got sidetracked and started over. A good one but not his best. Glad to move on.

I thought it was weird how the book is broken into three parts... the first part of book two was tremendously slow and I felt like book three was rushed compartively. Overall an ok read but The Bourne books were better!

This was a fun thriller, although after so many years, I don't remember many of the details. I did enjoy it, though.

Longer than necessary, too wordy