Scorpion Winter: Time for a Long Winter's Nap
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Author: Andrew Kaplan
Title: Scorpion Winter Genre: thriller If just about every fantasy novel or series written since 1960 seems to follow in the literary ruts of Tolkein's Lord of the Rings trilogy, you can likewise make the case that the spies in many espionage novels seem an homage to Ian Fleming's 007. While neither Tolkein nor Fleming was possessed of world-class literary skills, both somehow managed to define their genre for the next generation - or four - of authors. So it should come as no surprise that the protagonist of Andrew Kaplan's "Scorpion" series owes a great deal to tropes defined more than forty years ago by Fleming. a great deal. Scorpion Winter is the second in the series (after Scorpion Betrayal)... Scorpion (our hero's nom de guerre) was unwinding at his Mediterranean villa after wiping out a nest of Yemeni AQAP (Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula) types when some Russian bazillionaire tracked him down with an assignment. The ex-CIA freelancer (he only works for "the good guys") will come into a great deal of money if he can head off the assassination of a presidential candidate in Ukraine. The money's good (though his Ukrainian isn't) and the timing is short, so Scorpion dons the guise of a Canadian stringer for Reuters and hops a jet for Kiev. Once there, he quickly irritates some Ukrainian gangsters, but manages to enlist the aid of drop-dead gorgeous politico Iryna, campaign strategist for the target's opposing candidate, to ferret out the hitter. Bing, bang, boom: that was easy... Unfortunately, the two succeeded only in peeling back the first layer of an onionlike plot. Worse, in doing so, they managed to be identified as the assassins and make themselves the subjects of a nationwide man- and drop-dead-gorgeous-womanhunt. Scorpion's incredible skill in unarmed combat and his indifference to the trail of bodies he leaves behind him serve him in good stead as the fugitives wander about the snowy Ukrainian countryside hoping to clear their names. Since they're in Ukraine, someone must - of course - sneak into the exclusion zone around Chernobyl. Oooh, hot! In a labyrinth of double- and triple-crosses (and maybe a quadruple-cross or two), Scorpion and Iryna figure out the identity of the real assassin, but the truth never seems to be of much use around evil ex-commies. Thanks to a visit from the spy's best friend, deus ex machina, all will be OK in the end. If you care. I didn't. Sure, Kaplan's Scorpion is derivative of superspies like Bond and Bourne. What did you expect? Hundreds of pages of lurking and furtive phone calls? No, if it's gonna be a spy novel, the hero has to be a near-indestructible master of martial arts (Krav Maga in this case), kill lots of bad people without a second thought, and smarter than the average bear. It helps to have a fascinating back-story to explain his skillset - in this case, Scorpion is ex-Delta and ex-CIA in addition to having been raised by an Arabian Sheikh (gotta wonder about how he ended up in the US Army after that boyhood...). Unfortunately, that fails to humanize him very much. Kaplan's bio identifies him as a former journalist and war correspondent who served in both the US and Israeli armies (the latter during the Six-Day War. It doesn't say he was ever a spy, however... If you ask me, the reason why Fleming's Bond novels were so popular (besides the PG-rated sex scenes, which were unusual at the time) is that they're easy to read and easy to follow. Readers didn't find themselves flipping backwards through the pages trying to figure out how the characters came to a conclusion or simply came to a location. Not so Scorpion Winter. There's nothing wrong with wheel-within-a-wheel plots, though most readers (including this one) prefer that there be at least some hint that things aren't what they seem. A case in point: the first chapter of the novel, which features prominently in back-cover blurbs - is about a crucifix smuggled out of the Siberian gulag to the son of a dead prisoner. That son is not identified for 300 pages and even then the supposed importance of that crucifix remains unmentioned. That chapter looks more like the beginning of a different novel... The major tropes of Bondage are all present. There's the beautiful woman of whom the question is not "Will he bed her?" but "How many pages until he gets her naked?" There's the near-indestructibility of the protagonist. There's the good guys' ability to divine the meaning of cryptic comments, perhaps by telepathy. Kaplan also tosses in other, more modern tropes; such as the almost worshipful tendency to repeat brand names of armaments (the brand name Glock appears 72 times) and - perhaps influenced by TV shows - to invent software that installs itself, without administrator privileges, runs, and then deletes itself; all from a flash drive plugged into a computer for a few seconds. If readers don't mind the ill-defined backstory of the protagonist, the utter predictability of the liaison between male and female characters, and the spaghettilike plot construction, they still have to get past a Kaplan habit that is annoying as hell. That's the habit of using words in a foreign language and then immediately translating them: "'U vas yest pistolet?' the man with the cell phone said, asking in Russian if he had a gun." Or maybe you prefer French: "'She's a douleur cuisante,' meaning sharp as a whip... 'You think I'm a mouchard?' Scorpion snapped, using the French slang for stool pigeon." Four hundred-plus pages of that habit makes Scorpion Winter amedlenno chitatʹ a slow read. Kaplan also uses unusual schemes to transliterate Russian and Arabic to English: Russian for "what" usually transliterates to shto but here it's chto (though that's the spelling Google Translate uses - hint, hint); the robe worn on the Arabian Peninsula I typically see rendered as thobe shows up as thawb. Who am I to argue, though... Overall, a by-the-numbers spy novel that might as well have been created by dumping names and places into a template. It's marred by an overly complex plot and made annoying by an obsessive linguistic tic. I can't recommend it. all content copyright © 2014 by scmrak
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