Review by Booklist Review
Goldberg's third delightfully outrageous thriller again features Ian Ludlow, that dweebish novelist who has turned his fantasy life into super-successful spy thrillers. Problem is, the Russians have been flummoxing the U.S. with real-life ploys that appear to have been lifted directly from Ludlow's zingy novels. Or maybe all spies, real or imagined, just think alike. Whatever, as this adventure begins, the U.S. is taking no chances and has enlisted the chubby author to share plot ideas with the CIA, "just in case some of them might come true again." And so Ludlow becomes the reluctant hero of his own thriller. After a somewhat ponderous start, with too much backstory, Ludlow blunders into a Russian plot and must unearth the connection between a Mexican drug lord, a rogue army, and two dead tourists in Portugal. There are shootouts, bombings, car chases, and plenty of almost slapstick--but still murderous--mayhem. There are hilarious lines, too. Here's a waiter with "a nose so large it looked like he'd grown a thick mustache to help support its weight." For readers who enjoy madcap action. And a good laugh.
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
At the start of bestseller Goldberg's entertaining third Ian Ludlow novel (after 2019's Killer Thriller), Ludlow, the author of a bestselling series starring macho freelance superspy Clint Straker, returns to the U.S. with Chinese actress Wang Mei, having facilitated her defection, as well as prevented the assassinations of both the French and American presidents. But after a promise to the government not to put his real-life adventures into his books, Ian is suffering a bad case of writer's block. His research assistant, CIA operative Margo French, suggests investigating a random crime to spark his muse. A report of two tourists killed on a Portugal honeymoon leads Ian, with Margo's CIA resources, to uncover an operation by the Kitchen, a Russian misinformation company utilizing its own secret asset--a sleeper agent and right-wing Fox News host, Dwight Edney--to stoke the news' show's viewers' xenophobic fears with a fabricated violent immigration crisis and spark a U.S.-Mexico war. Who says preventing global destruction can't be funny? Goldberg continues to inject a welcome dose of levity into the thriller genre. (Apr.)
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Kirkus Book Review
Ian Ludlow, the novelist who's blessed or cursed with the ability to invent and transplant plot twists from real life to fiction and vice versa, gets a third opportunity to devise a rollicking tale that's ripped from the headlines and a bunch of James Bond movies. Always looking for new ways to bring the United States to its knees, Russia's GRU stumbles over a new wrinkle flooding digital media with fake news about nonexistent events: They provoke or invent incendiary incidents they can count on other news sources to parrot. Double-crossing every party she can find, GRU agent Beth Wheeler arranges to have a well-armed security team for an anti-immigrant Texas ranger kill two dozen clueless Mexican drug smugglers with weapons that will point to a White House conspiracy so that another clandestine group of GRU hirelings passing themselves off as enforcers for Mexico's Vibora drug cartel can execute the members of the security team. Not content with staging an incident bound to have international reverberations, Beth leaks to Fox News puppet Dwight Edney a recording of the president's expletive-laced vow to take revenge on Mexico that's so exclusive that the president never actually made it. The only way to prevent the two nations from being dragged into war is to wait until Ian and his research assistant, Margo French (Killer Thriller, 2019, etc.), return from Portugal, where Ian's search for new fictional inspiration in real-life anecdotes has plunged them into a hitherto unsuspected murder and endangered their lives, so that they can survive to revise the Russian agents' sinister closing act and make it more suitable for peaceniks and life in the Western Hemisphere. That's exactly what Ian does in a finale whose general outline is as predictable as its working out is hilariously surprising. The author's juggling of truth and fiction is almost as dexterous as his hero's. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
