Customer Reviews

Kilo Option

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

 

 

Pull back the reigns on this one, there is a lot going on and I just do not think the author had the skill to weave it all together in a tight, convincing way. Sure this book is interesting to read now given the state of American politics, but that is about the best I can say. And why the love interest from the past? I am convinced that long ago some book publishing executive wrote a set of rules which dictated that all action thrillers need some kind of sub plot love story. Then one just seemed to me to be thrown in by the author to placate someone other then the author thinking it was an intricate part of the story. I did find some of the detail of the Middle East interesting and the story does have its moments of fast paced action, but overall and average effort.

This book had nonstop action from the start to the finish.You
have Bill Lane as the hero of this book. The very evil villain in this book is Ukranian agent Valeri Yernin. Frances Shipley rounds out the cast of characters in this book. You are on the vege of war with Iraq being aided by the Ukrain. Because of evel deeds by the Ukrain nation Saudi Arabia and Iran are about to go to war. Bill Lane is in a nonstop shooting war with Valeri Yernin
on all corners of the world. Saddam Hussein even has a role in this story. Add all of these characters together together and
you have an exciting story. After reading this book I have already purchased Achilles Heel. Buy and read this book. It is good.

For those who know their military hardware, "Kilo" refers to a class of Russian built electric-powered (non-nuclear) submarines. Though shorter-ranged than nuclear subs which can remain submerged for months, the electric-drive is inherently quieter than nuclear power (which relies on pumps and piping), making boats like the kilo harder to detect, and thus deadlier. Add late 1980's technology to increase efficiency, throw in some deep-pockets clients from the sunnier (and less-stable) regions of the globe (where they watch C-span with a laugh-track) and the kilo becomes the cheap answer to submarine warfare - fast, deadly and impossible to find.

Strangely, the plot of "Kilo Option" similarly escapes detection, but that doesn't help things. Instead, "Option", in which charachters load up on plots and counterplots, goes beyond incomprehensible. Describing what the book is about is impossible, though it's safer to say what's in the book - Saddam Hussein plotting; fanatical Iranian mullahs; rogue Russians selling their hardware and services to the highest bidder; lots of shooting; lots of hardware; a hunky hero who never manages to get the bad guy (it's hard yto like a hero who fails to bring an end to this interminable book); and a Russian agent whose less a charachter than an engine of doom with dialog (even Darth Maul had funnier lines than this guy). with the plot so murky, there's never any sense that Flannery is working up to a climax, as if he can sustain a climax from an early shootfest thruought the length of his book. Thus, we only have a dwindling number of pages to mark the passage of the book (and even that can't always convince).

The weirdest thing about this book is the way it parallels the nonesensical "Crossfire" written by David Hagberg - Flannery's alter-ego. Throwing in some stuff about subs (sunken U-boats), a hunky (though retired) intelligence agent, some misunderstood Iranians..., mercenary Russians (with planes instead of subs), a Russian agent turned killing machine who seems to eliminate life out of compulsion, and no coherent plot to arrange them in, Hagberg has essentially written an earlier version of "Kilo Option".

What little that can be understood is annoyingly unoriginal, and the ... fundamentalist muslims, scheming Russians, rogue nukes, hunky heroes and Saddan Hussein lack the slightest hint of any development, as if they were off-the-shelf components for some cut-grade weapons system. If you come upon "Kilo option", I'd suggest another choice.....

Given what we are now living through with the threat that terrorists could acquire advanced weapons of mass destruction, this novel strikes a chord of reality and is worth reading as an intellectual exercise. All those who said we could never have imagined commercial airliners hitting large buildings had simply not been reading enough adventure fiction. Tom Clancy had a Boeing 747 hit the Capitol in one of his novels. Similarly, if at some future time we discover that someone really vicious has acquired a very advanced weapon system by bribing a disgruntled military member of a decaying system, we should not be surprised if we read Kilo Option. Flannery assumes that a group has bribed a small crew who were supposed to scuttle a Russian submarine to fake the scuttling and instead sail the submarine to a rendezvous and sell it to some people with really dreadful ideas about how to use it.

Considering the number of countries in which salaries are low and often months or even years behind in payment. Imagine the people who watch corrupt regimes and lose any faith in their leaders standing for anything. Imagine the steady proliferation of advanced systems across the planet. Then remember that the very sophisticated very expensive submarine monitoring system we built to track Soviet submarines during the cold war is now gradually disappearing as we focus on more immediate problems. The result could easily be an intelligence gap into which some really unthinkable things could happen.

Kilo Option outlines one plausible scenario and how it is ultimately stopped by a very narrow margin. It is worth reading and pondering.

It's no surprise that Sean Flannery and David Hagberg are one and the same, since Flannery's "Kilo Option" seems to follow Hagberg's chaotic "Crossfire" more closely than the other nonsensical, disorganized and utterly incomprehensible novel should allow.

As in "Crossfire" a quick-thinking and hunky American intelligence agent (though not retired) is locked in mortal and inter-continental warfare with a virtually deranged Russian agent. The two cross paths early on in the book in a confrontation that seems belabored and never in doubt (we know that it's too early for the pay-off of the evil spy getting his). The Russian (like the one in "Crossfire") is a killing machine - ready to destroy friend and enemy alike. But what is going on here? Even Flannery seems confused. He piles on details but has no patience to develop them or even let them congeal. the details themselves don't stand out: Iranian Kilos(Kilos are modern subs w/o Nuclear power; they're cheaper than "nuke' subs but sometimes harder to find); fundamentalist Iranians (actually just fundamentalists - old men in beards should be kept from guns but the secular Iranians should be trusted); rogue Russians gone mercenary; Saddam Hussein's perpetual plotting; and on. It's never clear what all these elements are doing in the same book, and Flannery quickly changes direction before the reader can begin to discern any plot. By the time that the story has headed for a climax, I'm almost praying that the Russian rogues or the Iranian hardliners (or somebody) to push the button and launch the stolen nuclear weapons. That would have to slow down Flannery.

A fan of Flannery's from the "Trinity Factor" on up to the heart-pounding "Winner Take All", I was disappointed with this, Flannery's second installment of his Bill Lane novels. It starts out fine, with a high body count, a resourceful villain and, in Lane, an equally resourceful protagonist.

However, Flannery trips over himself several times in an effort to make this story more complex than is necessary. Lane is dispatched not once, not twice, but three times to eliminate Saddam Hussien. In between each attempt the story spins further out of control. The redundancy got old quick, and the Iraqi didn't factor too heavily in the plot.

Oh yeah, the plot - it had elements of classic Flannery...stolen Kilo subs, terrorists, old-guard Ukrainian psychos, but the pacing is the worst I have ever seen from Flannery. The Kilo option, from which the book derives its title, is bagged in short order, and there's still another quarter of the book to read.

And Flannery has had problems in the past making his characters a bit too clairvoiant (mispelled) for their own good. Here it robs his characters of any sense of realism. As the villain robs submarine charts from a Navy base he confronts an SP and, of course, kills him. The next SP he encounters he correctly surmises when he looks in her eyes that she's not one of the ordinary guards for the building he's just broken into, that she found him too quickly for someone who was just checking on an unlocked door, and that she HAD to be the love interest of the sailor he just bagged four minutes earlier - and that she might even be pregnant...he figures all this out in the split second in which he zips her with a load of lead. Its a bit of a stretch. And Lane, the protagonist, is endowed with just as sharp a mind. I could use these guys when I'm buying stocks!

Bottom line: it has its moments but as a whole it doesn't add up to the wonderful suspense tales Flannery has spun in the past

Questions? email me muunrakr@wf.net

Bill Lane, an analyst for the NSA, returns to defuse impending disaster in the Middle East. He's matched against an equally interesting, well-developed villain. True to the genre, Flannery blends just the right mix of intrigue, mystery, treachery, action, and technical detail. Frances Shipley, Lane's winsome counterpart in the British SIS, reveals the softer, kinder, gentler side of our hero between explosions. One quickly discovers, however, that there are very few things Lane can trust beyond his Beretta automatic pistol. If anything requires willing suspension of disbelief, it's Lane's near-clairvoyance. Yes, he's supposed to be a brilliant analyst, but he always seems to interpret the available evidence precisely the way Flannery intends. Otherwise, it's a well-constructed, believable scenario - the pages pass very quickly. Fans of Tom Clancy and Larry Bond will certainly enjoy this title.

Lots of action and intrigue. I had a lot of fun reading this book, and believe that you will, too. Definitely one of his better, if not, best books to date. Far better than Tom Clancy, if you want a book that moves along, he takes the appropriate amount of pages to tell a story, unlike Clancy who takes a thousand pages, to write a three hundred page story.
Unfortunately he no longer writes under this name, but now writes strictly under the name of David Hagberg, rehashing the same 'Formulaic' story over, and over again, with his semi-retired spy/assassin Kirk McGarvey as his main protagonist.

Sean Flannery has again taken us into the shadow world of the CIA. A man with an axe to grind against contemporary Geopolitics, Sean never the less provdes a valid plot and lots of action for those who enjoy violence, non stop suspense blended with a clever revenge plot against a back ground of current events. The book just plain reads well

The first thing I thought when I finished this novel was say to myself: "What the hell was going on?" Even from the start of Kilo Option, Flannery baffles the reader. It reads as if he just slapped together a few action filled chapters without connecting them. The dialogue sounds like something out of an old G.I. Joe cartoon, and the characters all look alike and talk like John Wayne. I think Flannery intended Bill Lane to be the next Jack Ryan or Jake Grafton, but it doesn't come off. Bill Lane doesn't have the intelligence to be either of them. Flannery's novels do not have the authenticity of either a Clancy or Bond, and the scene aboard the freighter is an absolute and shameless rip-off of The Hunt For Red October. The plot is not well thought-out. What in the hell is Kilo Option anyway? The reader keeps guessing, and never finds out, and on top of that, we're threatened with a sequel. If you want to read something more plausible, read any novel by Clancy or Bond. Even a James Bond novel seems more plausible than this.