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BLINDFOLD GAME
by Dana Stabenow
St Martin's Minotaur, January 2006
272 pages
$23.95
ISBN: 031234323X


Buy in the UK | Buy in Canada

For most of the 20th century, political thriller writers had a plethora of well-defined enemies -- Germans, anarchists, communists, the Axis powers -- but the fall of the Soviet Union caused a turmoil in the field. Since 9/11, we have had Muslims to kick around, but no one has thought of that other nuclear power, on the borders of which we have had troops since 1953, North Korea, as an enemy until now. This being a book by Dana Stabenow, we even get three-dimensional characters instead of the cardboard cut-outs of other thriller writers.

A blonde tourist watches a bomb explode on Pattaya Beach in Thailand. Two Asian men, later determined to be Korean, are standing just outside the blast area, watching and generally acting suspiciously. The tourist follows them to a cafe away from the explosion scene, where 'Smith' and 'Jones' arrange for a ship to leave from Siberia. The blonde follows them but finally loses them when they board a plane for Moscow and then continue on to Odessa.

Arlene Harte, the blonde woman, a retired journalist who now freelances for a travel magazine, returns to the US where she reports to Hugh Rincon at his office in Langley, Virginia. She gives him a photo of the men in conference at the cafe. Hugh is on the Asian desk at CIA headquarters, but he cannot make his superiors understand the importance of his information. After all, these are Koreans, not Arabs.

Rincon, an Alaskan, whose wife Sara Lange is the Executive Officer of the USS Sojourner Truth, a coastguard cutter patrolling the Maritime Boundary Line, hitches a ride to Anchorage aboard a FedEx plane, where he calls another mutual friend, Kyle Chase, an FBI agent. Chase, Rincon, and Lange have been friends since they went to school.

The action moves easily and smoothly from Thailand to Langley to the ship and back to Anchorage. The descriptions of life aboard a coastguard vessel, chasing Russian factory ships trying to fish in US waters, during a storm, and during a fight with the bad guys, feel authentic, as well they should. Stabenow lived on a fishing vessel while she was growing up.

Even though this thriller is visually exciting and thought-provoking, I hope Stabenow doesn't give up on her series characters, especially Kate Shugak.

Reviewed by Barbara Franchi, November 2005

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Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)


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