Don't Buy a Wine for its Label and Don't Read a Book for its Cover
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Author: Suzanne Brockmann
Title: Flashpoint Genre: thriller I'll be honest: I'm pretty sure I chose this book just for the title, thinking perhaps to return a bit of symmetry to my personal reading list. I'd recently finished a book entitled Flashback (the second I'd read by that name) and thought, I suppose, that I needed a second version of Flashpoint to balance out the F section. What I can't figure out, however, is why I kept on reading this thing once I got into it... Tess Daniels wants to be an Agency spy, instead of merely sitting in an office supporting her co-workers in the field. The brilliant and quite sexy freckle-faced strawberry blonde has another secret yen: to screw the brains out of James/Jimmy/Diego Nash, field agent extraordinare and drop-dead-gorgeous hunk. She succeeds in one of those wishes (J/J/D) but not the other. Miffed, Tess quits her job to seek employment in the "private sector." Lo and behold, who does she end up working with on her first job? Nash, natch. The two are members of a five-person off-the-books undercover team inserted into some MidEast -stan or other, where women are forced to wear burkhas, thieves are punished by the loss of a hand, and the head honchos are evil and cruel irreligious Islamic warlords. The team's cover story is that they're relief workers sent in after a major earthquake, though their true objective is to bring out a laptop computer left behind when a terrorist chief (tall, skinny, bearded, with serious kidney disease [snort!]) was killed by the quake. While in country, the team encounters a helpful local teenager and an angelic American expatriate to lend a hand in the fun and games. Mean people meet their just rewards, the good guy and gal bang each other silly until they run out of condoms, and everyone but the terrorist types leave Kazbekistan happy. What's not to like? Plenty: With characterizations that give saran-wrap competition in the thinness department and a plot that stretches credulity well beyond its elastic limit, Suzanne Brockmann's Flashpoint could still have survived had it happened to be witty, funny, or charming. Alas, it has none of these qualities. With a plot ripped from the headlines (assuming the headlines were written in the winter of 2001-2002), one should be able to identify with what this happy band of spies is up to - but one can't. Consider the Mission Impossible team: at least they know what building their quarry is in, but this team is looking for a laptop - an eensy-beensy laptop! - amid the rubble of a largish city, and their only search criterion is that the villain might have left it within walking distance of the hospital where he probably died. And, given that they're supposed to be from such a great "Agency," one would expect them to know that their villain underwent periodic kidney dialysis, but this seems to come as a surprise to them. Nope, there's no sense to the spy thriller at all... Instead, Flashpoint is concentrated on the worst features of the Bondian spy-thriller genre - relentless action, mindless sex, and stereotypically merciless villains - while combining them with the worst of chick-lit - perpetual whining about relationships and endless reverse sexism. Tess and Nash, while on a dangerous mission to a hostile country (with no running water), are all over each other like a pair of hormonal teens at every opportunity. When they're not doing the horizontal bop, they're playing incessant one-upmanship games, to the consternation of their teammates. What a pair of ninnies! I certainly hope that real undercover operatives working for this country know enough to put their glands on hold long enough to get their jobs done. Flashpoint is billed as a "romance thriller," although it appear neither very romantic nor particularly thrilling to me except that there were a few moments of mild suspense. On the romance front, however, if this is where romance readers "learn" how a relationship is supposed to progress and how men are supposed to act, that sure explains a lot of mindless misandrism. If you're itching to see a strong, intelligent female character carrying her load, rent a DVD of "GI Jane" or buy a V I Warshaski mystery - this one's a loser. all content copyright © 2014 by scmrak
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