Customer Reviews

A Different War: A Mitchell Grant Adventure

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It seems that the end of the cold war has left Mr Thomas as lost as many of his characters. In reviewing a book that uses many characters from previous novels it is difficult to avoid reference to those books. As a Craig Thomas fan of 20 years I was hoping that the forgettable 'A Wild Justice' was an abberation, and the enticing 'Gant is Back!' on the cover of 'A Different War' made me hope that this book would be up to the standard of the 'Firefox/Firefox Down/Winter Hawk' Trilogy, in which Gant was the main character. Well 'A Different War' is certainly more engrossing than its immediate predecessor but sadly does not live up to the Craig Thomas of old.

The plot revolves (as in 'A Wild Justice') around two parallel and initially unconnected stories. Mitchell Gant, ex-USAF ex-CIA hotshot pilot and now aircraft accident investigator, is trying to find out why Vance 494 airliners are inexplicably crashing. Meanwhile Marion Pyott MP is investigating wholesale diversion of European Community funds intended for urban redevelopment. The two storylines are eventually tied together, but unsatisfactorily, with minimum interaction between the main players and the reader almost expected to guess the connection.

There are excellent individual moments in this book; I was sweating as freely as Gant was as he fought to land a crippled jet in one piece. Other events however, such as Pyotts survival in what should have been a fatal car crash, lacked credibility. There are irritations as well: after spending hours trying numerous means to identify one mysterious bad guy, supposedly intelligent Gant finally thinks to use the obvious method that I, and I am sure many other readers had been screaming at him for pages. Although there are many tangled threads in this novel, Mr Thomas uses a rather lazy and improbable plot device plucked from the air to provide the one clue that will lead Gant to the truth. It is almost as if Mr Thomas got bored part way through what was originally intended to be a longer story. The ending was unsatisfactory; one moment the two main characters are fighting for their very lives against impossible odds in two different parts of the world, but literally a few pages later the book ends with everything neatly wrapped up, with numerous questions unanswered.

Despite the above critisisms 'A Different War' is still an excellent book compared with others of its type; perhaps I am being hard on Mr Thomas simply because he has written so much better in the past. But even bringing back some of the much loved characters of previous novels lacks credibility in this book. Gant, hero of 'Firefox' twenty years ago, must now be in his fifties, but is still winning gun battles and hand to hand fights. His character is shallow compared with the complex personality revealed in books he has previously appeared in. Retired SIS chief Sir Kenneth Aubrey is more familiar, but has been depicted as physically almost at death's door in the last three or four novels in which he has appeared. In 'A Different War' he is suddenly sprightly and energetic, although reference to 'Jade Tiger' makes him now about eighty years old.

Unfortunately most of Mr Thomas's best characters, good and evil, have either now been killed in previous books or are becoming too old to be credible in the roles they play. His newer ones, like Ms Pyott, lack the same depth of character although this is at least partly due to the shorter length of his more recent books. But the fundamental problem for Mr Thomas and many of his readers is the difficulty in making novels about commercial skullduggery as exciting as a good cold war thriller. His previous works reveal him to be an expert on the spy rings and military hardware of previous decades, an expertise no longer useful in the type of books he is now trying to write. The title 'A Different War' refers to the way in which the commercial fight in the post cold war era is a different one to that with which most of the characters are familiar. Sadly, it is a war which Mr Thomas is not as comfortable fighting either.

Gant is back...but so is everybody else in a slim book that tries to tie urban renewal, corporate saboutage and aviation together. In "Different", Mitchel Gant has retired from both USAF and the CIA. For those unfamiliar with the character, Gant was a former fighter jock who was emotionally and physically scarred due to his experiences in Vietnam; after the war, the CIA plucks him from obscurity and teaches him to fly again. Never getting past his war demons, Gant becomes a master, flying America's collection of "appropriated" Russian fighters. When the Soviets develop a fighter plane superior to anything in the west, Gant is sent into the USSR to steal it (the action spread into two novels - "Firefox" and "Firefox Down"). Gant reappears in the epic "Winterhawk" on a mission that has nothing to do with the Firefox, but involves a personal conflict born in "Firefox Down". By the time the events in "Different" occur, Gant has already survived "Desert Storm" (he flew stealth fighters) and has been both married and divorced and now spends his time investigating aircraft accidents. Gant's former father in law, CEO of a company that builds jet liners, is in trouble when his airplanes - Vance 494s mysteriously fall out of the sky, and he reluctantly turns to Gant for help. Meanwhile, David Winterbourne, the corrupt head of a vast corporate empire faces some problems of his own stemming from cost overruns on a mammoth jet liner that nobody wants to buy. Meanwhile, Marion Pyott, a young and strong willed MP, looks into mysterious delays in an urban renewal program undertaken by Winterbourne Holdings. Though the action involves separate threads, we soon learn how they are linked - with the delays in Pyott's program resulting from diversion of funds to shore up Winterborne's bloated jet liner, while the 494's problems were actually caused by sabotage meant to eliminate competition in orders for the Winterbourne plane.

Though it covers a big subject (actually several) "Different" is a surprisingly short book. And while it heralds the return of Mitch Gant, the story does less with him than it does with Marion Pyott. (Gant gets most of the action, but author Craig Thomas, whose books are famous for their character development, devotes more time to the headstrong Pyott). Thomas tosses in charcters familiar to his avid readers - like Ken Aubrey - but they seem more like cameos that don't hint at the extraordinary development they've had. Because the story is so short, Thomas doesn't spend enough time curing our suspension of belief : he frequently tosses in almost unbelievable plot twists, but cures that with plots that make it clear that nobody is getting off easy. In "Different", the "howlers" include Gant's being able to locate the mysterious sabouteur using a photograph that may have been taken anywhere on Earth; Winterbourne saboutages the 494 as a competitor even though the story makes it clear that the two planes are completely different - like a minvan builder saboutaging Ferraris (Boeing and Airbus are nowhere to be found, but you'd think the market for aircraft is larger, yet only Vance's jets fall out of the sky). Still, for those waiting for Gant since "Winterhawk", "Different" is fun with Thomas's breathless prose and a conspiracy as deep as anything Soviet. The flying scenes won't exactly rival Firefox, but, for a non-pilot, Thomas is more evocative about flight than most former fighter drivers. When Gant first takes to the air in the Vance airliner, the slow transition to flight makes you feel more airborne than flight scenes in other books - even though you know you're only flying an airliner, that there won't be any dogfights and that the cold war is over.

Craig Thomas brings back Mitchell Gant, the hero of the "Firefox" books and "Winter Hawk". It's set in the 90's and the last time we've seen Gant was when it was still the cold war, so Craig brings us up to speed on what Gant's been up to; having flown stealth aircraft during Desert Storm, Gant married and divorced from the daughter of a CEO of Vance Aircraft, a company that builds airliners. He now investigates airplane crashes.

But his old father-in-law runs to him for his help. One of his new Vance 494's fell out of the sky and wants Gant to look into the matter. Of course it was no accident. David Winterborne, head of Aero UK, had arranged it. It seems business entrepreneur Tim Burton was buying the Vance aircraft instead of airliners from Winterborne Holdings, and Winterborne just won't have that. During all of this, Winterborne Holdings is being investigated by British MP Marion Pyott, daughter of Giles Pyott from other Craig novels. Winterborne and Pyott have been friends since childhood, so Winterborne doesn't think he's in any real danger of being found out when Pyott insists on getting to the bottom of delays in an urban renewal program. But when Pyott doesn't get scared off by his milder attacks on her, Winterborne doesn't hesitate to get really nasty.

It's all a tad confussing, and the storyline actually bored me a little with all that British economic stuff with Marion Pyott, but it was at least nice to see Kenneth Aubrey around again after being absent for a couple books, helping Marion out with her situations. Where the book really entertains, though, in the ususal Craig style of course, are the sceens with Gant. The action takes him to Scandinavia, to England, and to France where he finds a clue in the form of a photograph that will lead to the final killing-ground. I was actually able to guess where the clue lead to because I'm familiar with the area that the photo was described as.

All in all, it was an alright book. It may try your suspension of belief at times, and the subject matter isn't as intriging (at least for me) as his earlier novels. But it'll still entertain followers of Craig.

In "A Different War", Craig Thomas returns his grizzled and unlikely hero Mitchell Gant for what looks to be his swan-song. Last seen saving the west from a conspiracy of Soviet Generals on the verge of launching laser-weapons into orbit (in the epic 1987 novel "Winter Hawk"), Gant is shown leading a less-spectacular existence as an aviation accident investigator. (There are references to special Iraq missions Gant flew - this story appeared in '97, well after "Desert Storm".)

When a prototype airliner crashes under mysterious circumstances (well, not that mysterious, it looks like poor design work), the plane's builder asks Gant to investigate. As the plane's manufacturer is also his ex-father in-law, Gant only begrudgingly accepts the invitation. Gant's vindication of the airplane only reveals a much larger and potent conspiracy, one involving a British tycoon with his own troubled airliner project. Meanwhile, the niece of Kenneth Aubrey (Thomas's perennial spy-chief hero) picks up threads of the same conspiracy on her end of the Atlantic.

This was a pretty good book, and it's always a treat to read Thomas's trademark-prose, with their finely-tuned sense of urgency. It does suffer in comparison to "Winter Hawk" and of course the "Firefox" books, and we soon get the idea that the story will boil down into a chase for the conspiracy's designated agent-of-destruction. The story as a whole lacks the urgency of earlier stories, and Thomas's use of technology as a dues ex machine - while not uncommon in his books - isn't balanced by the compelling story or characters of his other books. Still, a great read and fun for Thomas fans who may despair ever seeing another novel. (War was published a decade ago; the next novel, "Slipping into Shadow" appeared three years later, and appears to be the last of his novels.)

Mitchel Gant, the harried but heroic aviator of Craig Thomas' cold war techno-thrillers "Firefox" "Firefox Down!" and "Winterhawk" is back. While Gant, like the technothriller genre, seem out-of-place in the 1990's, author Craig Thomas knows well enough not to try stretching outdated ideas. Where once he faced sinister Russians and high-tech fighter planes, Gant is now on the run from Aero UK, a consortium of evil MBA's who succeed by literally crashing the competition. No longer with the CIA, Gant now investigates crashes for the FAA, poring over the ruins of airliners nowhere near as exotic as the Firefox. While investigating the crash of an Aero UK competitor, Gant is pulled into a web of corporate deceit not unlike the power-plays of the cold war, and easily as deadly. With billions at stake, Aero UK will stop at nothing to prevent Gant from revealing its role in the saboutage. Though corporations replace the KGB and the Vance 494 airliner seems a far cry from the MiG-31, Thomas pulls it off, producing a gripping novel, with his trademark prose, terse and fast paced lines written as if the author was in the middle of Tae Bo. Thomas' detailing of Gant's first flight in the Vance jet conveys the gravity and fluidity of flight in ways no author-pilot has been willing or able to approach. Still, "War" is not quite up to the earlier Thomas epics. Its fast pace only highlights how slim a book it is and Thomas doesn't give "War" the wide scope of say "Winterhawk". There is no superweapon slowly bearing down on millions, no seemingly unreachable border, nothing to really convey tension. And there isn't enough of Gant. The nominal hero, Gant is only one of several players, one whom Thomas seems almost reluctant to bring out. "A Different War" is only one of Thomas' latest attempts to say goodbye to the kinds of books he wrote in the 1980's. I just wish he wasn't so eager to do so.