Timebomb

November 28, 2011
In the prologue to this dense spy novel from Seymour (The Collaborator), a disgruntled KGB agent who’s recently lost his job, Maj. Oleg Yashkin, secretly buries a suitcase-sized nuclear device in a remote patch of what until recently used to be the Soviet Union. Fifteen years later, in 2008, Yashkin sells the device to a Russian criminal outfit that plans to deliver the weapon to a terrorist network intent on detonating it in the U.K. or the U.S. Meanwhile, a group of Western intelligent officials who get wind of the plot organize Operation Haystack to prevent the bomb’s delivery. Major players include Russian nationalist Josef Shlomo Goldmann, a money launderer who leads a double life; Goldmann’s ruthless associate, Reuven Weissberg; and former British corporal Johnny Carrick, now working for Goldmann in an undercover capacity. International thriller fans who read chiefly for plot will be more rewarded than those who value engaging characters. Agent: Curtis Brown.

January 15, 2012
Embedded as a driver in the London home of Russian money launderer Josef Goldmann, undercover officer Jonathan Carrick's assignment is yielding no useful information. But when intel regarding the sale of a portable nuke makes Goldmann of interest to MI5, the stakes rise. Carrick foils an apparent assassination attempt and finds himself finagled into Goldmann's trust just as they hook up with the broker, mafia heavy Reuven Weissberg whose lineage, nihilism and innate distrustfulness descend from a survivor of the Sobibor extermination camp. As a pawn in the hands of the brusque, unorthodox Christopher Lawson, 38 years an officer with the Secret Intelligence Service, Carrick walks the high wire sans safety net, enduring ruthless tests by mafia thugs. Meanwhile two disgruntled former Soviet soldiers excavate the weapon from its hiding place in a vegetable patch and set off in a decrepit car on a bizarre, often Quixotic odyssey, facing border crossings and inspections with the weapon hidden loosely under a tarp. The buyer, an Islamic militant operative known as "The Crow," has lined up an expert to verify the device's authenticity, a nuclear scientist let go from his position for family connection to the tribal areas in Pakistan. Themes of disenfranchisement breeding treachery and buried evils inevitably resurfacing permeate this latest, balletic thriller from Seymour (Walking Dead, 2008, etc.), whose sense of historical underpinnings, earned from years of covering terrorism as a journalist, elevate this tale to the heights of the genre, offering sprung steel suspense and sobering depictions of a world tilting on its nuclear fulcrum from Cold War deadlock to post 9-11 volatility. As the threat of nuclear terrorism looms, Carrick's psychological state threatens collapse. Weissberg leads him to the site of one holocaust--will it become birthplace of another? Intricately crafted and clocklike in its controlled release of psychological and geopolitical tension.

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January 1, 2012
With the collapse of the USSR, a KGB major with 32 years' service is unceremoniously laid off. Humiliation quickly becomes anger, and before he leaves, he steals a suitcase nuke and buries it in his yard. Years later, destitute, he and a fellow former KGB officer embark on a trip across Russia to deliver the weapon to a buyer. In London, a famously rude and abrasive Secret Intelligence Service officer connects obscure signals and divines what is about to happen. He also takes control of an undercover London cop who is working as a bodyguard for an expat Russian money launderer, a middleman in the deal. Both the cop and the money launderer are emotionally teetering due to the pressure they're under, and any of these stressed-out players could make or break the transfer of the devastating bomb. Seymour, who is classed with espionage luminaries like Ambler and le Carr', has crafted a convoluted plot and a host of complex and exquisitely tormented characters, but it's his focus on human frailty that makes Timebomb a winner.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2012, American Library Association.)