The Venetian Judgment

February 16, 2009
At the start of bestseller Stone’s formulaic third thriller to feature CIA “cleaner” Micah Dalton (after The Orpheus Deception
), Dalton takes revenge late one night outside Venice’s Piazza San Marco on one of the Serbian thugs responsible for the death of his lover, Cora Vasari. Dalton’s actions result in his becoming involved in the search for a high-level traitor in the CIA’s ranks, who’s believed to be behind the brutal murder of elderly Mildred Durant, an unofficial adviser to an NSA decryption team known as the Glass Cutters, in her London home. Durant worked on the Venona Project, the interception of Soviet cable traffic, during the cold war. It appears Stalin “had a source close to Roosevelt who was never exposed.” While no one will mistake Stone for John le Carré, series fans are sure to root for the unstoppable Dalton, compared at one point to “the newly risen Christ, only blond and not quite so loving, with a bullet scar on one cheek and no intention at all of turning the other.”

March 15, 2009
CIA "cleaner" Micah Dalton is in bad standing with the Company but manages to acquire yet another wound and slaughter five bad guys in the first few pages of this suspenseful sequel to the author's two previous breath-stoppers ("The Echelon Vendetta" and "The Orpheus Deception"). The novel's violence is juicily graphic, and Stone's main evildoer is nearly satanic. Stone's work is not smoothly literary, instead moving in leaps from one subplot, one location, and one character set to another. Even so, his descriptions of the many different settings are nicely detailed; there are numerous characters, but not an excessive amount because of Stone's proficiency at rendering each memorable. His technique lends authenticity to the main story line, part revenge tale, part search for a possible mole in one of America's intelligence agencies. In the end, readers may be left with as many questions as answers. Recommended for all public libraries.Jonathan Pearce, California State Univ., Stanislaus

Copyright 2009 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

April 1, 2009
Despite a badly chosen title (easily confused with Steve Berrys The Venetian Betrayal), this is a very good thriller. Its the third novel to star Micah Dalton, the former military intelligence operative who now does special projects for the CIA, and it opens with a bangor, more accurately, a series of bangsas Dalton systematically kills the members of the Serbian gang who nearly killed the woman he loves. Dalton is surprised to come out of his revenge-fueled murderous rampage alive, and hes even more surprised when his boss asks him to find the spy deep within the American government. This is one of those thrillers that starts big and keeps getting bigger until its final momentsa thriller propelled by its tough characters, terse dialogue, and two-fisted action. Its the sort of thing Robert Ludlum might have written in his heyday. As a matter of fact, in many ways, Stone can be considered a successor to Ludlum, except that his prose is fluid where Ludlums is frequently clunky. For fans of high-testosterone thrillers, this one is a must-read.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2009, American Library Association.)