Customer Reviews

12 Drummers Drumming (Gemstar)

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Deverell takes great pains to tell us that she was a diplomat. In the cover blurbs and the author's note and the bio page, her greatest credential is the five years she spent as a junior officer in the U.S. foreign service,. What she doesn't reveal is that as a junior officer, she spent two years in San Salvador stamping visas into passports, dozens each day, the bureaucratic equivalent of flipping burgers. As a junior personnel officer in Poland, she spent two years reading regulations about sick leave and salary grade levels. She brings all of this talent and experience to bear in Twelve Drummers Drumming. Her purported detailed understanding of the inner workings of the State Department in Washington (where she never worked) consist of two facts: that S/CT is the name of the counter-terrorism office and INR is the name of the intelligence bureau. These are tidbits anyone can get out of the phone book. Beyond that she really has no insights at all about what goes on behind the scenes in Washington or in overseas embassies.

However, her puffing up her resume is nothing new in publishing or any other field. It would all be quite excusable if only the book was a good one. Unfortunately, it's not. Casey Collins, the herone, shares many of the author's resume bullet points: El Salvador, Poland, Denmark. We can only hope that the Collins character didn't also inherit her creator's personality. For Collins is a whiny self-absorbed bore. She thinks in puerile simplicities, she is breathlessly in love or dangerously heartbroken. Childishly shocked by this or that perceived insult, convinced by the heavenly purity of her love, mewling about how difficult are her life and her mission, getting into ridiculous situations like a blind kitten and then pouting that she has no way out of her predicament. The premise of the book is promising, but the writing is unimaginative, the characters uninteresting, and the plot unconvincing. There are lots of writers out there in the suspense/espionage genre, better to give Deverell a pass.

12 Drummers is engaging, exciting stuff, recalling the thrills and chills of LeCarre and Deighton. But here, the dusty old men's club is aired out, and human connections have real substance. (So does the food!) A great read for a winter evening.

For over a decade Casey Collins has sought out, confronted and apprehended terrorists. And when a New York-bound flight from England explodes shortly after takeoff, killing all on board, she fears Stefan Krajewski, a Polish operative for the Danish Defense Intelligence and her lover, went down with the plane. Casey immediately flies to England to investigate.

Casey's motives are pure, but her actions quickly become suspect and she's forced underground to prevent capture by her own people. Working with people she neither knows nor trusts, she learns Stefan withheld information that would have influenced her objectivity over the years; secrets that now threaten to destroy her and those she loves. Betrayal...that fine line between love and hate. The cost of betrayal...the number of lives of innocent people lost to kill one operative.

Not once, not twice, but three times she offers herself as bait to catch Reinhardt Kruger, the monster orchestrating the bombings. Not once, but twice she rendezvous with him and twice he has reduced the size of her little band of mercenaries in his wake to escape.

Faced with death on foreign soil by the enemy or imprisonment back in the states by her employer, the US Government, Casey does what she does best. She meets her adversary head on and spits on those responsible for the violence surround her.

Each page is filled with fast-paced suspense and you'll find yourself wondering what's going to happen next. As a former Foreign Service Officer in San Salvador and Poland, Deverell draws on her experience to give authenticity to the settings and nations of people who value human life so little, thereby giving her audience an excellent read.

Diana Deverell has given us a new heroine, Casey Collins. Ms. Deverell's experience as a US Foreign Service officer makes this book a must read. I picked it up and couldn't put it down. The twists and turns in the plot kept me guessint right to the end. I am going out tomorrow to buy her second book.

American Foreign Service Officer Casey Collins is stunned to learn that a cross-oceanic airliner exploded in air from what apparently was a Lockerbie-like bombing incident. Casey fears that her lover, Polish double agent Stefan Krajewski, who works for the Danes, died on the ill-fated flight.

Desperate to know the truth about her beloved, Casey quickly flies to Denmark to determine whether Stefan still lives. Her inquiries come to the attention of Danish and American officials. Eventually, she finds Stefan, but he has a beautiful blond attached to his arm. Before she can decide what this means, Casey finds herself running for her life as she has become the prime suspect in the Lockerbie Two bombing. With no one else to trust, Casey has an uphill battle to prove that she had nothing to do with the fatal airplane explosion.

12 DRUMMERS DRUMMING is an exciting thriller that is hurt by the common error of debuting authors, who try to develop too many different story lines in one book. Instead none of the sub-plots fully get developed and none of them take charge of the story line. Still, Diana Deverell clearly has talent as her first published novel remaisn an action-packed, non-stop international thriller that will please fans of the sub-genre.

Harriet Klausner

Dumb, dumb book. All about terrorists and plane bombings. Deverell's first novel and it shows. Writing is atrocious, plot far too intricate. Who could plot 12 bombings at the same time?