Red Mercury [Audio Cassette]

Max Barclay (Author), Brian Keith (Narrator)

Book Description

Publication Date: July 1996

Since the bloody Munich Massacre at the '72 Summer Games, the Olympics have been a magnet for international terrorists. In this fast-paced thriller set at the 1996 Centennial Olympic Games in Atlanta, Red Mercury takes you behind the scenes of the massive security operations protecting the Olympic Games, and asks the horrifying question, "If nuclear technology fell into the wrong hands, would they be prepared?" 2 cassettes.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

The centennial Olympics in Atlanta: America is on display; thousands of domestic and foreign bigwigs are drinking Coke on CNN. What better time for a delusional genius to assert himself with a new, terribly deadly and virtually untraceable nuclear weapon. It might be a rather obvious scenario, but then, so are plenty of other thrillers. What California-based investigative journalist Ben Sherwood, in his debut as Max Barclay, does so well is to flesh out these bones with plenty of convincing dialogue (in both techno-speak and English), psychological twists, plot complications and enough red herrings to keep the narrative going without overworking the main premise. Best of all is the wealth of precise well-researched detail on Atlanta, military hardware, terrorism, Olympic history, criminal psychology and nuclear technology. Barclay could have done without quite so many characters: there's a dulling sameness to the early chapters in which character after character is introduced, and the reader may be reduced to scribbling notes until it becomes clear which characters ignite and which are just spare kindling. Partly because of the sheer size of the cast and partly because Barclay's focus is so squarely on action, the protagonists?Kyle Preston (squad leader, FBI Olympic Counter Terrorism Task Force) and Mack McFall (DOE nuclear weapons designer)?aren't fully developed. And when they predictably declare their love, the reader is still left wondering exactly why. It's the kind of thing that could be worked out in a movie version. $50,000 ad/promo; film rights to Avnet-Kerner for a possible CBS mini-series; author tour.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Product Details

• Audio Cassette
• Publisher: Dove Entertainment Inc (July 1996)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 078710972X
• ISBN-13: 978-0787109721
• Product Dimensions: 8.5 x 5 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 5.6 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #10,572,920 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent, fast moving, fictional account of Nuclear Terrori, February 10, 1997

By A Customer

This review is from: Red Mercury: A Novel (Hardcover)

Red Mercury; Book Review By C. L. Staten - ERRI Senior Analyst (ENN) Another in a series of several excellent counter-terrorist novels recently caught this author's eye and was quickly devoured by this inquiring mind. The book, "RED MERCURY", tells an increasingly more believable tale of fissile material stolen from the super-secret Soviet city of Chelyabinsk-65. It then follows the international trail of the atomic agent as it moves towards Atlanta and a nuclear attack on the Olympic Games. Along the way, we learn about the Nuclear Emergency Response Team (NEST) and our fictional former SpecOps leader, Mack McFall. Add a female karate back-belt as head of a special FBI CT "Javelin" HRU team and mix with some deranged and vindicative paramilitary bombers. Finally, factor in a frantic search for the possibility of a material called "Red Mercury," a pure fusion nuclear material, that could destroy Atlanta and a large part of the Eastern Seaboard. The book is filled with many authentic details (and some purposely fictionalized) about Atlanta, the Olympics and its security arrangements, and the nation's leading counterterrorist forces. It focuses on the fearsome possibility of the use of a improvised nuclear weapon of mass destruction (WMD), which contains the here before illusive "pure fusion" combination of radioactive materials that give it, its name, "RED MERCURY." The book, written by "Max Barclay", a believed pseudonym of an S. California investigative journalist, provides an extensive number of references and the names of resource persons who contributed to the effort. All in all, we would have to give it an A- and recommend it to members of the emergency, military, and intelligence community. Because of its fast pace, it admittedly is one of those books that you could pick up and find hard to put down until the dramatic ending.

2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Well Researched?, January 17, 2002

By A Customer

This review is from: Red Mercury: A Novel (Hardcover)

This book was purportedly well researched. Well, maybe while the author was collecting data on weapons of mass destruction, he forgot to read up on how people really speak and act. The characters in this book were overblown caricatures of every other player you've ever read about in the spy-thriller genre: Deranged villain seeking to extract revenge on government for cancelling his top secret research project battles noble, selfless, widower hero who can withstand all injuries to outwit villain and still fall in love with beautiful, gutsy, blackbelt heroine who fights the good 'ol boy network to earn her place on the team. Need I go on?

Also, this may be a nit, but the author lost all credibility with me in the first chapter, when he stated that the weight lifters from Uzbekistan had won several medals at the World Track and Field Championships. Sorry Max, there are no weightlifting events at the World Track and Field Championsips. That error is fairly obvious - Track and Field is not Nuclear Physics - God knows what else he got wrong.

2 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An elaborate, well-researched nuclear thrill ride!, November 18, 1997

By A Customer

This review is from: Red Mercury: A Novel (Hardcover)

I have never been a fan of counter-terrorist type international thrillers, but this novel's intricate plot of potential mass devastation at the Olympic Games is truly riveting. The author combined accessible technical direction with a clearly plausible plot and fallable yet magnetic characters. When coupled against the back drop of one of our most cherished international events, these "improvised nuclear devices" and "pure fusion" concepts are as staggering as they are sobering.