Robin Burcell's The Black List is Blacklisted Around This House
Amazon says:
Author: Robin Burcell Title: The Black List Genre: thriller
In those dark days following 9/11, pundits seized on the lack of interagency cooperation as one reason for the intelligence community's failure to "connect the dots." Eleven years later, ex-FBI forensic artist Robin Burcell imagines a world in which there is so much interagency cooperation that it's hard to tell which of her characters works for what set of initials - Interpol, MI6, CIA, FBI, or some black-budget group that calls itself "U.N.C.L."... err, "ATLAS." Sadly, it's not just hard to tell who works for whom, it's also hard to care.
FBI Special Agent Tony Carillo's soon-to-be-ex-wife Sheila got herself tangled up with a dumb blonde named "Trip" (usually a nickname for something like Worthington Hopscotch Glengrant III), who'd gotten himself mixed up with the wrong charitable umbrella organization. Seems that bad people running "A.D.E." decided young Trip had some book or other filled with secrets about their naughty business. So, people die left and right.
Carillo dragged his ex-partner Sydney Fitzpatrick into the business, and she dragged in Griffin, the superspy on whom she was crushing like a seventh-grade girl, and his partners Doc and Tex. Apparently they're big on nicknames in the spy biz, just like they're big on acronyms and initialisms.
The action moved to Europe, where the fellowship expanded to include the CIA and MI6 (and either the French Surete or Interpol, it's hard to tell which) before jumping to refugee camps in some unidentified corner of Africa. Suffice it to say that bad people are involved, but the good guys are able to out -wit or -gun them whenever they need to. All is right with the world... except some nut's running around with a cannister of cesium 137. Oh, well, another day, another dirty bomb plot.
Now, *this* Blacklist is good!
About the best thing I can say about Robin Burcell's The Black List is, "At least it doesn't have any vampires." Otherwise, it's a complete loss of several hours of my life that could have been better spent playing solitaire or washing the car (and I hate washing the car).
Burcell's work is aimed at the segment of the public that wants their romance simmering instead of steamy and would rather read about a bullet in the brain than a hand on a breast. That's OK - I find the obligatory sex scene(s) in many mystery-thriller novels to be unnecessary, as if the author tossed them in to pad the word count - of course Burcell pads her word count by ratcheting up the sexual tension like an '80s sitcom (think "Cheers"), what with her protagonist (I guess Sydney's the lead character, but I'm not certain) pining after Griffin at every turn.
For my money, the goofy romantic angle is only slightly distracting. What's disappointing is that the plot is so labyrinthine that I'm pretty certain the author got lost herself. Just about any hoary old trope you've ever run into in a second-rate spy thriller is in there.
What's also disappointing is that the characters are pastiches of every spy-thriller character since Fleming, and the dialog is so stilted it sounds like a junior-high drama club reading "Hamlet." TO make matters worse, the premise is chock full of holes.
Oh, and there's at least one too many visits from the Coincidence Fairy. And the way Burcell writes the ex-wife Sheila? She ought to be ashamed. Nope, as far as I'm concerned, The Black List is... well, it's on my blacklist.