This is the first book that I've ever read by Don Brown (not to be confused with Dan Brown...). I must say that the story was very gripping. And the cover is really cool.
The story centers around Russian plutonium that is stolen by Chechen terrorists who use it to create a hydrogen bomb. An American submarine is sent on a highly dangerous mission to intercept the freighter that is carrying the plutonium. As tensions between the Russians and the Americans escalate, things go terribly wrong. The US sub commander is arrested and transported to Moscow to appear before a military tribunal on charges of war crimes.
I really liked the pacing of the story. There was plenty of action, and lots of scenes were filled with political maneuvering, personal drama, and military tech/jargon. It definitely wasn't boring at all. There were several characters and story-lines followed for most of the book, so it stayed very interesting.
My biggest problems with the book are:
1. The dialogue was sometimes cheesy.... It is my opinion that conveying "spoken words" is the hardest part of writing fiction - so I am not usually too hard on authors for this. But the US President in the book just said some corny stuff. And almost ALL of the Russian characters had some "corn". (The Russian characters had this annoying habit of referring to everyone by their FULL name - multiple times in the same conversation. "Why do you say that, Nikolai Petrinkov?", and so forth. Maybe this is a part of Russian culture that I am just unaware of. But it got on my nerves a little bit.)
2. The guy that I thought was the main character, the JAG officer representing the sub commander at the tribunal, didn't even show up in the book at all until about 50 pages from the end. SERIOUSLY?!?! He is the first of only two characters mentioned in the description on the back cover of the book, so you would reasonably assume he was the main character, right? Needless to say, we didn't get to know that character well at all before the book ended. Speaking of that....
3. The ending felt hacked off and rushed. There is a difficult balance an author must strike between writing too much after the climax/resolution and hacking the book ending off. I definitely feel Don Brown did the latter. The bomb is intercepted and diffused, the US and Russia make peace, the sub commander and crew are returned home, and the sub commander is reunited with his kids - all in just a couple of pages.
All in all, it was a good book - and I'd definitely read some of Don Brown's other works. 4 out of 5 stars.
(Thanks again, sis!)
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