Jericho Quinn, the Alaskan native and Air Force Office of Special
Investigations (OSI) operative who now works on sensitive missions directly for
the National Security Advisor Winfield ‘Win’ Palmer, is back for his third
go-around in State of Emergency,
another fast-paced affair where the body count seems to get higher with every
chapter, and where Quinn, teamed up with his offsider, Gunnery Sergeant Jacques
Thibodeaux, US Marine Corps, and sometime-love interest Veronica ‘Ronnie’ Garcia,
must save the world again.
This time, the stakes are higher than ever: the murder of a
Russian a conglomerate of Middle Eastern terrorists and unsavoury types from
South America have combined to both murder an undercover Russian operative and
steal a nuclear device, one that dates back to the bad old days of the Cold
War. The Islamic extremists have designs on detonating it on American soil – of
course – as a final strike in a campaign that has begun with explosions in both
San Francisco in America and St Petersburg in Russia. In Idaho, an expert on
nuclear weapons has been captured at gunpoint to help the bad guys complete the
assembly of the bomb. If he doesn’t, they’ll kill his wife and son.
Quinn is exactly the right guy to sort through the mess of
drug dealers, terrorists and spies and get to the guys with the dirty bomb
before they’re able to detonate it. He’s aided by Thibodeaux – the banter
between the two is as good as ever – and a Russian agent, who was close friends
with the Russian killed in the opening pages of the novel. Even Jericho’s
younger brother, Bo, who has a shady past connected to motorcycles and gang
crime, gets to join the mission on this one – a little improbably, I thought. A
guy who is a convicted criminal isn’t likely to be working on a top-secret job,
no matter who his brother is!
It’s no secret by now, three books in, that Cameron loves
both bikes and knives. Quinn manages to employ both with effective (and
sometimes deadly) force, and in State of Emergency manages to partake in the
dangerous Dakar Rally, ostensibly because the crazy Venezuelan who is at the
centre of the entire plot is there, too. Why he’d be competing in a bike race
whilst his cohorts are putting together a nuclear bomb is beyond me. It seemed
like a weak way to squeeze in some ultimately-meaningless detail about a bike
race more interesting, clearly, to the author than to me.
That Dakar race chapters made little sense to me – I mean,
it didn’t really serve to advance the plot a great deal – and there was a
noticeable lull in the middle of the story, which sapped the early momentum
that the storyline had built. The action really didn’t pick back up until they
left the race and began the hunt in earnest in the muggy jungles of Bolivia,
and then back to American soil.
As generally happens in these types of formulaic but still
very entertaining thrillers, the bad guys are vanquished and the good guys are
able to move on with their lives, content that they’ve saved the world once
more, leaving Jericho to ponder who he really wants to be with, his ex-wife or Ronnie
Garcia.
Look, State of Emergency
isn’t the best Jericho Quinn instalment I’ve read, but the cliff-hanger
ending will be more than enough to pick up the next book in the series pretty
soon! I guess that's the way to get people coming back for more!
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