Customer Reviews

Wages of Sin

5 star:		(10)
4 star:		(14)
3 star:		(8)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(8)

 

 

"Liars & Thieves" (published as "Wages of Sin" in Europe) is a quite different book from the Jake Grafton series that made Stephen Coonts famous. Personally, I don't like the change in style.

I'm a fan of thrillers, especially international thrillers and techno-thrillers. I like most of Stephen Coonts' books and consider them to be "the thinking man's thriller", a notch up on the intellectual scale from Tom Clancy, for example.

"Liars & Thieves" is different from the Jake Grafton series in many ways. To start with, the main character is Tommy Carmellini, a CIA operative who plays a secondary role in the last four Jake Grafton books.

Tommy Carmellini reminds me of Mike Hammer, the fictional hero of Mickey Spillane's books. He's physically big, he's tough and doesn't shun violence, he's great with the fast-paced repartee and he doesn't claim to be all that smart. Women find him attractive (what's with these silly women anyway?) and he beds them without much emotional involvement. And he tells his story in the first person.

Fortunately, Stephen Coonts is not 100% loyal to the first-person style. As the book progresses there are more and more passages that tell parts of the story that Tommy Carmellini can't tell because he's not at that location.

There is a lot of violence in this book, something that doesn't particularly appeal to me. The body count rises slowly but surely through the story, with Tommy personally killing 13 of the "bad guys"! These shootouts and other fights are described in detail, and are exciting at first, but about half way through the book it gets tedious.

The romantic (to use the word very loosely) subplots are very minor. Tommy succeeds (without trying or particularly enjoying it) in bedding three of the female characters. But if Tommy doesn't really care much one way or the other, why should we?

The weirdest scene in the whole book is when Tommy makes love to one of the women in a bugged hotel room, knowing that his best friend is monitoring the bugs! The fact that he doesn't particularly like the lady in question just added to my incredulity!

A general problem with the whole book is that the characters are poorly presented and not very believable. Surprising, considering that Stephen Coonts is otherwise very good at writing books populated with real people.

In particular, Tommy Carmellini doesn't come across as a believable person. To make it worse, he isn't a person that I find all that appealing. He's great at shooting holes in the bad guys and making clever remarks, but I'd prefer a leading "good guy" who is smarter and displays more real human characteristics.

On the plus side, the plot is pretty good. The story is partly based on the real-life defection of Vasili Mitrokhin, the KGB archivist who arrived in Great Britain in 1992 with six suitcases of notes from classified KGB files! Mix this with an American presidential nomination and people in high places with a past that is damaging to their political careers and you have an exciting cocktail.

Still, the good plot can't compensate for the disappointing characters and the repetitive violence, so I'm only giving three stars to "Liars & Thieves".

Rennie Petersen

Mini-Review: "Liars & Thieves" by Stephen Coonts

I have many things for which I am indebted to my friend, John Byington. One of those debts is that fact that he introduced me to author Stephen Coonts - not to be confused with Dean Koontz! A few years ago, John, an Annapolis graduate and former Navy aviator, made the following observation: "You have come to know quite a few of us Navy guys who were pilots. If you really want to understand the world of naval aviation, you should read Stephen Coonts' "Flight of the Intruder."

I did read "Flight of the Intruder," and vowed to read as many of Coonts' other books as I could. Last year I enjoyed reading "Liberty," and I have just completed the riveting "Liars & Thieves." Coonts is a Viet Nam combat veteran and naval aviator, who went on to earn a law degree. He writes with a rapier wit and an acerbic and sardonic view of a world inhabited with a wide assortment of "bad guys," and a few old-fashioned heroes. Here is an example of his wry gift for introducing a character and setting the right tone:

"Obviously Dorsey had not considered the possibility that Willie might refuse to tell her whatever she asked. Few men ever had. She was young, beautiful, rich, the modern trifectas for females. She came by her dough the old-fashioned way - she inherited it. Her parents died in a car wreck shortly after she was born. Her grandparents who raised her passed away while she was partying at college, trying to decide if growing up would be worth the effort. Now she lived in a monstrous old brick mansion on five hundred acres, all that remained of a colonial plantation, on the northern bank of the Potomac thirty miles upriver from Washington. It was a nice little getaway if you were worth a couple hundred million, and she was." (Page 2)

The plot of this book involves double-dealing all the way from the Kremlin to the West Wing of the White House, as the two heroes, Tommy Carmellini and retired Admiral Jake Grafton, lay their lives on the line to try to save a former KGB official who has defected to the West. I won't spoil the treat for you by revealing anything else about the story line.

I could not put the book down. What else is there to say about a book!

Enjoy.

Have been a fan of Steve Coonts, a former shipmate, for a long time, since "Flight of the Intruder" and all the rest. Hate to see Jake Grafton "retired" but that's more on me than on Jake, as I'm retired now, too. Won't bother with synopsizing the plot, which is no wilder than many of this genre, but the body count is VERY high, and as one other reviewer pointed out, there are many editing oversights. Carmellini is a Spillane-esque character: kills people without a glance, sleeps around with no apparent regard for the medical risks, maintains a rugged physique with no more exercise than an occasional run, survives everything shot, thrown or exploded at/under him, and also does throwaway gag lines. I didn't find him all that appealing, just as I don't care for Dirk Pitt, Clive Cussler's supermensch. There is also some mystery about Jake being a "consultant" who is still able to make a phone call and get a Delta Force team on site, no questions asked. Fortunately, the story moves along at such a high velocity that these are nit-picky details that only emerge after you've turned a page and then suddenly wonder "hey, how did THAT happen?" If you don't expect anything profound, it's a decent beach read.

This novel is episodic and sometimes rambling, with little character development (except perhaps Willie and Sarah). Starting about half way through, the story becomes confusing from time to time when the author confuses characters (he writes "Dorsey" when he should have said "Sarah", for instance). Where was the editor? The worst case was when the protagonist of the 1st person narrative (Tommy Carmellini) is speaking and says he is driving, then says that Tommy Carmellini (along with other characters) was in the back of the van. Huh?

Lots of "padding" with travelogues, weather reports, and irrelevant details that go nowhere. Most of the book is a long chase sequence with the body count going up, up, and up.

I could have better spent my book dollars elsewhere. I will, next time, by choosing another author.

Stephen Coonts' latest novel, Liars & Thieves, is a reasonably good techo-espionage thriller set in the United States. Tommy Carmellini is a CIA agent who happens to stumble upon a CIA safehouse as a massacre is going down. The disturbing part is that the killers are most definitely from the US and look professional (either military or law enforcement). Carmellini is able to rescue one lady who is a Russian interpreter debriefing a Russian defector that was an archivist for the government and copied seven cases of materials over the years. The defector is able to escape on his own, but his age and failing memory leaves him in a state of confusion as to where he is and what's happening. The killers figure out who Carmellini is, and he (and anyone around him) is now a target of someone who appears to be high up in the government, and wants everything related to the defector (including the defector himself) eliminated to protect a secret. Carmellini enlists the help of Jake Grafton (a major character from earlier Coontz novels) to get to the bottom of the mystery and to stay alive.

I'd give this a higher rating if it weren't for a stretch before the final showdown takes place. Through the first half of the book, someone is after Carmellini is being hunted every time he turns around. Once he decides to go to New York to try a last effort to uncover the truth, he ends up being left alone for a number of days while he sets up survellience and listening bugs. Then at the end, he's conveniently a walking target again and nearly gets killed at every turn. The break just didn't seem to fit too well in the story flow. That fact notwithstanding, it's an entertaining read that will entertain you for awhile.

Liars and Thieves accomplishes a great deal in the first 150 pages. The action is quick and the story moves along rather well. It deals with a CIA officer that is visiting a relatively secret CIA camp. He shows up only to find dead CIA personnel throughout. He realizes that the killers are still there so Tommy Carmellini has to figure out what is going on and how to get out alive. He ends up escaping and running and trying to decide on how best to proceed to find out what happened. He soon discovers that the FBI is also after him.

The book continues a brisk pace when Admiral Jake Grafton becomes involved. In fact, the reader is drawn to Grafton as being a strong interesting character that is no nonsense.

My problem with the book is it begins to delve too much into politics, both american and russian and it loses a lot of its more exciting edge. Most of that is kept out of the first 15-200 pages, but then it dominates the final third of the book. Though there are some solid action and dialogue scenes during the final third, it is often put in the background as Coontz attempts to explain the politics of what is going on.

As I mentioned, I give a lukewarm review. 5 stars for the first two thirds of the book...2 stars for the final third.

This book is a good book, especially if you haven't read a lot of realitic military fiction. This book has a character that is a lot like James Bond, the invincible spy. After a while, this character's unrealistic achievements ruin the book. Many of the things don't make sense if you think about them. One of the things that is most incongrous is that a group of soldiers is able to overrun CIA's specially trained guard troops, but then is consistently defeated by a signle agent.

Things like this happen throughout the book, and all the while people are dying. It seems that one character is able to handle the world, something that everyone should know isn't true. If you want a book with a lot of shooting action, this is for you. If you want a book with real substance, you's be better off looking somewhere else.

"Wages of Sin" (European title, published as "Liars & Thieves" in N. America) is a quite different book from the Jake Grafton series that made Stephen Coonts famous. Personally, I don't like the change in style.

I'm a fan of thrillers, especially international thrillers and techno-thrillers. I like most of Stephen Coonts' books and consider them to be "the thinking man's thriller", a notch up on the intellectual scale from Tom Clancy, for example.

"Wages of Sin" is different from the Jake Grafton series in many ways. To start with, the main character is Tommy Carmellini, a CIA operative who plays a secondary role in the last four Jake Grafton books.

Tommy Carmellini reminds me of Mike Hammer, the fictional hero of Mickey Spillane's books. He's physically big, he's tough and doesn't shun violence, he's great with the fast-paced repartee and he doesn't claim to be all that smart. Women find him attractive (what's with these silly women anyway?) and he beds them without much emotional involvement. And he tells his story in the first person.

Fortunately, Stephen Coonts is not 100% loyal to the first-person style. As the book progresses there are more and more passages that tell parts of the story that Tommy Carmellini can't tell because he's not at that location.

There is a lot of violence in this book, something that doesn't particularly appeal to me. The body count rises slowly but surely through the story, with Tommy personally killing 13 of the "bad guys"! These shootouts and other fights are described in detail, and are exciting at first, but about half way through the book it gets tedious.

The romantic (to use the word very loosely) subplots are very minor. Tommy succeeds (without trying or particularly enjoying it) in bedding three of the female characters. But if Tommy doesn't really care much one way or the other, why should we?

The weirdest scene in the whole book is when Tommy makes love to one of the women in a bugged hotel room, knowing that his best friend is monitoring the bugs! The fact that he doesn't particularly like the lady in question just added to my incredulity!

A general problem with the whole book is that the characters are poorly presented and not very believable. Surprising, considering that Stephen Coonts is otherwise very good at writing books populated with real people.

In particular, Tommy Carmellini doesn't come across as a believable person. To make it worse, he isn't a person that I find all that appealing. He's great at shooting holes in the bad guys and making clever remarks, but I'd prefer a leading "good guy" who is smarter and displays more real human characteristics.

On the plus side, the plot is pretty good. The story is partly based on the real-life defection of Vasili Mitrokhin, the KGB archivist who arrived in Great Britain in 1992 with six suitcases of notes from classified KGB files! Mix this with an American presidential nomination and people in high places with a past that is damaging to their political careers and you have an exciting cocktail.

Still, the good plot can't compensate for the disappointing characters and the repetitive violence, so I'm only giving three stars to "Wages of Sin".

Rennie Petersen

While I truly appreciate some of the valid criticisms of my fellow reviewers on this page, I nevertheless think that this book is outstanding. It is a style change for Mr. Coonts, but why should he not be allowed to reach in different directions? And, if it is a style (first person, Spillane-like, characters not totally fleshed-out, much shooting) that doesn't appeal to a particular set of readers, I guess that's ok. I think that Coonts' main Grafton books are superb, and superbly written; this is different, and has its own merits. I think many people will find it just as much a page-turner as I did, and enjoy it for what it is....rather than be upset for what it's not.

LIARS & THEIVES is a tongue-in-cheek kind of thriller that alternates from the first person to third. The gist of the story is that Tommy Carmellini stumbles into an execution at a CIA safe house and barely survives the encounter. Before he has a chance to catch his breath, Tommy is running for his life and everywhere he turns the bad guys show up.

Without giving anything away, the book basically works except for the relationship between Tommy and an on-again/off-again love interest named Dorsey O'Shea. The end of the book is too cute by half, and when you sit back and think about it, the plot turns on an incredible coincidence.

But if you can ignore the logical incongruence, this book is much better than his dreadful SAUCER.

The style comes across as a smart-alek DEEP BLACK without the edginess.

The subject matter goes back to the Cold War, which is rather odd considering the current conflict, but I suspect even a successful author must deal with agents and publishers that are skittish when it comes to confronting the War on Terror.