Seek and Destroy by Alan McDermott

Published by Thomas & Mercer on November 14, 2018

Seek and Destroy is the second novel in Alan McDermott’s Eva Driscoll series, which spins off from his Tom Gray series. The novel is self-contained and can be read as a stand-alone, although it assumes a familiarity with a conspiratorial organization called the ESO and with some of the characters, including Gray, who is “a hero to the right wing” but “a terrorist in the eyes of many.”

Eva Driscoll has been secretly pardoned from the prison sentence she earned by investigating the ESO and her brother’s murder. Her team members took new identities and escaped to presumptive safety, but in India, Farooq Naser has just received a “we found you” video. Eva is in Munich with her lover Carl Huff, but a message from Farooq sparks a reunion of Eva’s team in Europe.

Meanwhile, Henry Langton is on an uncharted island leading a group that is charged with eliminating Eva and her team. That’s not going well so he decides to attack Gray in the hope that Gray will contact Eva’s team for help. Then he plans to follow the team members as they lead him to Eva. The plan doesn’t seem particularly plausible but plausibility is never a strong point in thrillers of this nature.

Eliminating Eva isn’t easy because Eva, like most action heroes, is indestructible. In one scene, armed just with a handgun, she takes out eight armed men. Yes, she gets a boo-boo on her cheek, but there’s never a sense that Eva is actually at risk. The same is true when Gray, Eva, and some expendables assault Langston’s island. They easily take out more than twice their number of trained mercenaries and sure, a couple of expendables don’t make it, but the reader will not work up a sweat worrying about the central characters.

Whether Eva qualifies as an action “hero” depends, I suppose, on whether the reader thinks a vengeful killer who assassinates unarmed technicians because they assisted a bad guy is justified in her lawlessness. Not to be outdone, Gray puts some gratuitous bullets in an unarmed character who is bleeding to death because he figures death alone isn’t a sufficient punishment for his misbehavior. I didn’t care much for the self-righteous avenger attitudes of Driscoll and Gray but readers who confuse self-righteous anger with morality might like them.

The novel justifies its title with a good amount of travel and destruction, as Driscoll and her team make their way to Mexico to arm themselves so they can launch an underwater attack on Langston’s island to rescue Gray’s kid, where she is being held hostage. The island invasion is preposterous, but that’s the nature of modern action thrillers. The travel gives the novel the story a certain amount of atmosphere.

McDermott writes fluidly and the novel maintains the kind of pace that action thrillers need. He takes time to give Eva and Gray personalities, even if the personalities are fairly standard and not particularly admirable. The conspirators are playing the long game, infiltrating government and hoping to place one of their own in the American presidency, an overdone premise that has become tiresome. Nothing about Seek and Destroy allows it to rise near the top of the mountain of books just like it. Die-hard action novel fans and followers of the Tom Gray series might want to read it, but other thriller fans can find better books to occupy their time.

RECOMMENDED WITH RESERVATIONS

Trojan by Alan McDermott

Published by Thomas & Mercer on January 12, 2017

Trojan reads like a police procedural, although the police are a mix of British intelligence agents, anti-terrorist military specialists, and occasional freelance assistants. Torture, for instance, is subcontracted so that Her Majesty’s government can pretend its hands are clean.

An asset with the code name Hannibal has infiltrated Saif al-Islam in Syria. He learns that Saif al-Islam has a chemical toxin that it plans to unleash on the British but, despite Hannibal’s best efforts, the Brits don’t know what it is or where it will be deployed.

The primary good guys are Andrew Harvey and his lover and co-worker, Sarah Thompson. They play a limited role in the opening chapters, as Alan McDermott develops the plot with a primary focus on the terrorist plan and the desperate efforts of British intelligence to get a handle on it. The plot involves several women and their babies who, posing as refugees, transport the toxin. The only one of those who benefits from any character development is Malika Ali.

About a third of the novel has gone by before Andrew and Sarah, as well as their colleagues, play a more active role in the plot. They are thinkers rather than action heroes. Trojan offers a pleasant alternative to all the thrillers a follow a team of former Special Forces heroes as they chase down terrorists, taking occasional breaks to give the reader loving descriptions of their weapons. It’s refreshing to read a novel about a terrorist threat in which the heroes are driven by intelligent thought rather than testosterone. It’s also refreshing to read a thriller that recognizes a distinction between Muslim terrorists and Muslims who condemn terrorism.

Andrew and Sarah engage in the tedious task of winnowing intelligence from cameras and records, but McDermott describes their efforts without subjecting the reader to the same tedium. Trojan contains an occasional action scene, but most of the story involves a battle of wits as terrorists use various schemes in an effort to evade police surveillance.

McDermott also describes the political infighting that inevitably arises when people charged with protecting a nation’s security care more about career advancement than working together to stifle a threat. That theme is often used to give the reader a chance to cheer for the selfless good guys as they battle the self-serving bureaucrats, but McDermott recognizes that even selfless good guys want credit (and career advancement) for doing a good job.

A bit of melodrama in the relationship between Andrew and Sarah is too obvious to add anything interesting to the story. Fortunately, the story maintains interest in other ways. Tension elevates steadily as the good guys chase down leads, exhausting possibilities and themselves while laboring to find the deadly toxin before it’s released. The plot isn’t innovative and the ending is predictable — perhaps even a bit anticlimactic — but the story is grounded in realistic scenes as intelligence agents move step by step toward a solution to the crisis. Trojan is a good fit for readers who like thrillers about real people doing believable work, rather than superheroes who perform impossible feats.

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