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I have a burning need to know stuff and I love asking awkward questions.

Thursday, October 11, 2007

Just Finished Reading: Cuba by Stephen Coonts

Fidel Castro is dying. Conspiracies are already underway to bring forward a successor. At the heart of the most dangerous is Minister of State Security Alejo Vargas. With his police force to command and the secrets he has accumulated over the years he has managed to intimidate almost everyone. He also has an ace in the hole if all else fails. For he knows of the secret locations of six remaining ballistic missiles left over from the Cuban Missile Crisis, now fitted with state of the art biological weapons – each aimed at the heart of a separate American city.

Thrust into this arena is Rear-Admiral Jake Grafton in charge of a carrier battle group off Cuba’s coast. He is under orders to prevent to launch of the missiles at all costs and must sacrifice the lives of the men and women under his command if necessary to save the lives of millions of his countrymen. The clock is ticking and Grafton cannot afford to make a single mistake.

I like Stephen Coonts. He manages to get across often quite fantastical ideas in a understated way – without being insultingly jingoistic (unlike Dale Brown). Coonts clearly knows his military but uses that knowledge in a more subtle and nuanced way than some other authors in this genre (like Dale Brown) so that I for one didn’t feel insulted by incessant flag waving. The portrayal of Cuba itself seemed to be rather stereotypical – though I don’t know enough about it to pick apart the particulars of his description – and the military personnel did seem fairly two dimensional at times but the story was an interesting one and the combat sequences were well handled. Whilst not exactly a book to win any awards this was a reasonably good and entertaining read. One for the beach maybe.

2 comments:

dbackdad said...

I've never read Coonts. I might have to try him out. As I've mentioned before, I was a Clancy fan for a long time but got fed up with the increasing jingoism.

CyberKitten said...

Coonts is pretty good. He's an ex-Naval aviator so brings that realism to his writing. He does go a little too far from time to time but normally manages to hold himself in check. If you're looking for a fair political techno-thriller to switch your brain off to then Coonts is your man.

I too went off Clancy a while back. It seems like he had joined the ranks of writers who decided that since the US had failed to dominate the planet in real life that they would do it in fiction.