The Hadrian Memorandum

Folsom's latest doesn't quite equal his earlier efforts. Nick Martin, a former LAPD detective and now a landscape architect, is sent to Equatorial Guinea by the U.S. president he saved in Folsom's last adventure. The plot involves a corporate conspiracy to control a massive new oil field. It's all a bit much: a brutal dictator, greedy corporate executives, a brutal government army, a band of equally brutal rebels, and, naturally, the CIA. The best scene is an exciting chase--thanks to narrator Scott Sowers, listeners will be kept on the edge of their seats. However, throughout most of the reading, Sowers's voice is too nasal and rough, and his foreign accents lack polish. Die-hard Folsom fans will probably want to listen. Others may not. A.L.H. (c) AudioFile 2010, Portland, Maine

September 21, 2009
Bestseller Folsom's improbable sequel to his equally improbable The Machiavelli Covenant
(2006) takes ex-LAPD detective Nicholas Marten, who's trying to create a new life for himself as a landscape architect in England, to Equatorial Guinea, at the behest of the U.S. president, John Henry Harris, who became his confidante in the previous book. In a village on the island of Bioko, Marten meets Willy Dorhn, a 78-year-old German-born priest, who shows him photos of rebels being armed by members of a U.S. security firm hired to protect American oil workers. Soon after, soldiers who serve the impoverished country's brutal dictator attack the village, leaving Dorhn dead and Marten a fugitive. Marten's efforts to report what he's learned to people he can trust lead him to Germany and Portugal. Readers expecting a nuanced look at corruption in sub-Saharan Africa in the vein of John le Carré's The Constant Gardener
will be disappointed.

January 25, 2010
The first mystery in this abridged thriller involves the identity of the reader. The box says it’s Holter Graham, but the reader identifies himself on the disk, correctly one assumes, as Scott Sowers. Actually, Sowers’s voice, with its rat-a-tat edginess, is a better fit for a tale that is one long, breathless chase, from Central Africa to Berlin. The premise is somewhat hard to swallow: the U.S. president sends an ex-LAPD cop-turned-peace-loving British landscape artist named Nicholas Marten to find out if mercenaries in the pay of a Texas petro company have been involved in atrocities in oil-rich Equatorial Guinea. Nicholas discovers the existence of a camera memory card filled with just the sort of incriminating photos he needs. All he has to do is locate it somewhere in Europe and sidestep the mercenaries and smarmy CIA agents on his tail. With an intensity that seems genuine and a talent for assorted accents, including British, German, and Portuguese, Sowers maintains a state of suspended disbelief. Another plus is the abridgment, which gets the story told seamlessly with no strings left hanging. A Forge hardcover (Reviews, Sept. 21).