Ghosts of War

April 25, 2016
The stakes are high in bestseller Taylor’s workmanlike 10th Pike Logan thriller (after 2015’s The Forgotten Soldier). Simon Migonuv, the head of a Russian organized crime syndicate, is summoned to Vladimir Putin’s Black Sea estate, where he attends a meeting with the Russian president and four executives of Gazprom, the world’s largest oil company. On Putin’s orders, security men smother the Gazprom executives for their failure to stop the Ukrainians from working on a gas line that would make their country no longer reliant on Russia for energy. Fearing for his life, Migonuv agrees to do what he can to provoke a war in Europe, including shooting down an American aircraft. Standing in the way of that calamity are Pike, a member of a discredited covert U.S. antiterrorist unit known as Taskforce, and his allies, including Shoshana, a stereotypical Israeli assassin who snaps out of a catatonic state after a prompt from Pike to remember the Pumpkin King from Tim Burton’s movie The Nightmare Before Christmas. This is a standard action thriller, full of violence but short of surprises and developed characterizations. Five-city author tour. Agent: John Talbot, Talbot Fortune.