The Author Should Be Crowned - With a Baseball Bat!
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Author: Brian Haig
Title: The Kingmaker Genre: thriller The Cold War is over (though I'll bet you already knew that). Its ending spawned a sea change in the world of espionage thrillers: no longer does our urbane CIA / Mossad / MI6 / U.N.C.L.E. agent match wits with an evil opposite number from the very bowels of the Kremlin. No, nowadays those literary games of Spyvs. Spy are fought against filthy rich terrorists, international arms dealers, rogue scientists, and the like. Oh, sure, the trademark Bulgarian assassins are still in play - after all, there were quite a few on the job market back in the early nineties - but the KGB's reach definitely shrank with the near-overnight collapse of the Soviet bloc. A few thriller writers didn't seem to get the message; or maybe it's that they've ignored the news in favor of geopolitics as usual. One such writer - a relative newcomer to the scene - bears a famous surname and, like so many offspring of power, has parlayed that well-known name and a modicum of talent into a multi-book contract. This time the author is Brian Haig, son of erstwhile Reagan SecState Alexander "I'm in charge here!" Haig. And, as is usually the case, Haig proves that having a famous name isn't necessarily a key prerequisite for a book contract... At the least he fails to demonstrate conspicuous talent in his latest novel, The Kingmaker. A Pot of Plots JAG lawyer Sean Drummond - like Harmon Rabb of television's "JAG" a dashing former line soldier detoured into military law for health reasons - has been assigned the dream case. Of course, nightmares are dreams, too: Drummond's been tapped to defend the apparent Benedict Arnold of the twenty-first century, Brigadier General William Morrison. His client's charged with espionage, treason, murder, adultery, and probably several hundred counts of littering and jaywalking. Morrison has allegedly been feeding sensitive information to the Russkies since before the fall of Dutch's Evil Empire. The case? Ironclad. The defense? Begrudging. Begrudging 'cause Sean has a history with Morrison - or more accurately, Morrison's beauteous wife Mary. A doozy of a history, in fact... The opposition's had the case for months. The JAG corps' top-gun lawyer is prosecuting. All poor johnny-come-lately Sean has for support is a clerk and a couple of paralegals; plus he's forced to search outside the office for a second-chair lawyer who can speak Russian - which is how he ends up with leggy legal misfit Katrina Mazorski. With the entire judicial system stacked against them, Drummond and Mazorski seem saddled with a hopeless cause. Morrison, however, insists on his innocence... but, then, don't they all? When his lawyers suddenly become the targets of a series of assassination attempts, though, they're convinced they've stumbled upon a conspiracy of massive proportions; a conspiracy fully capable of making a US Army general its fall guy. Who? What? And Above all, Why? In his third outing (previous works are Secret Sanctionand Mortal Allies) Haig adopts a style reminiscent of L. Ron Hubbard in his staggeringly stupid Battlefield Earthseries. Drummond, Haig's protagonist, is a wise-cracking loner with but a tenuous grasp of human nature. The stable of characters is rife with stereotypes: arrogant senior officers, arrogant Type-A attorneys, beautiful sexpots for all the younger women, incredibly efficient chubby grandmother-types for the older women, master manipulators for villains... You can almost see Haig daydreaming about casting the film version of his book even as he's writing. Let's see: Tom Cruise for Drummond, Angelina Jolie for Katrina. We need a blonde sex goddess for Mary Morrison, but Cameron's too young. Hmmmm, decisions, decisions. Haig's characters are stereotypical and his plot's just a notch above hackneyed. I'll give him that much: although the concept of a deeply-buried mole at the highest levels of government isn't exactly original, he's at least been able to update it to the post-Kim Philby era. Haig, however, paints the agencies charged with protecting our nation's secrets - initial-mongers like the CIA and NSA - with broad strokes of his brush dipped in buffoonery. One would certainly hope that thie is all literary license (and, to be sure, nothing in his brief book-jacket bio suggests any firsthand knowledge). Given a slightly above average plot, Haig fritters away this one advantage with poorly constructed characters, dialog at the level of a "Mallard Fillmore" comic strip (and of approximately the same politics), and action scenes that rarely rise to the level of yawner. And Haig has the effrontery to dis Jackie Collins at one point! Apparently he's under the mistake impression that he's a better writer than Collins. Close call, Brian... A minimalist sexual tension between the horny Drummond and the two stone foxes in his life is neatly shattered by the plot - I'll give Haig that much; he didn't slather his book with gratuitous sex, though from the adolescent yearnings of his protagonist it looks as though he certainly wanted to. The attitudinal Drummond, who acts more like a jam-clad surfer boy than a thirty-nine year old lawyer - is quite possibly one of the most irritating protagonists to hit fiction in several decades. Overall Though I've never been a great fan of the espionage genre, especially as practiced by Ludlum, et al., I've always considered them a reliable fallback position in the field of escapist literature. Espionage thrillers have fallen on hard times, though, and this sort of novel is prime evidence. Besides displaying but limited writing talent, Haig panders to dad's old neoconservative audience in a sanitized thriller only slightly to the social left of the Left Behind series. Meanwhile, he - like more than one AM talk show host - has fleshed out a sub-adequate effort by sniping at the Clinton White House. One wonders what if he and his ilk will worry at the topic like a pit bull with a knuckle bone for another generation. I sure hope not, but I suspect the opposite is true. all content copyright © 2014 by scmrak
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