Gregg Eldred

After finishing Pirate, I was looking forward to the most recent Ted Bell novel, Spy. This one did not disappoint.

Opening with his escape from an Amazon slave labor camp, Alex Hawke has discovered that he has been held at a military/terrorist training camp. But to what purpose? While Alex is recuperating, a small Texas town is being tested by the Mexican military/drug cartels. The sheriff has his hands full trying to keep the peace as well as to figure out why speeding semi tractor trailers seem to be driven by . . . no one. And then there is the missile that Stokely Jones finds off the coast of Key West, where a conference on border security and South American issues is set to begin. All of this occurs in the days leading up to a US Presidential Inauguration.

In what could be Ted Bell's finest Alex Hawke novel to date, he is able to tie the separate plot lines together in a very plausible, and scary, scenario. Al Qaeda is operating a training facility in the Amazon in order to support a very violent jihad against the United States. Implicated in this are the governments of Cuba, Bolivia, and Mexico. Running the operation is a very well drawn villian, Mohammed Top. And there is a code that is contained in the pages of The Da Vinci Code, that, if broken, will tell Alex what he needs to know about the jihad (I thought that was a cool touch).

This is a fast paced novel, with a lot of action. A highly recommended book. If you are looking for the new James Bond, Alex Hawke is what you need.

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