The Mullah's Storm

July 26, 2010
At the start of Young's well-crafted first novel, a transport plane carrying a high-value prisoner, a radical mullah, is forced down in the rugged Hindu Kush of Afghanistan. Maj. Michael Parson, the plane's co-pilot, and female Master Sergeant Gold, an interpreter who speaks Pashto, must brave a ferocious winter storm and reach a nearby Special Forces team with the mullah, but they wind up in the hands of Taliban insurgents. The SF team rescues Parson, but the Taliban escape, taking the mullah and the translator in opposite directions. The team must try to recapture the mullah, but Parson can't abandon Gold because "You love your comrades more than you hate your enemies." Young (The Speed of Heat: An Airlift Wing at War in Iraq and Afghanistan) draws on his own war experiences for verisimilitude, which, along with believable characters and an exciting plot, makes this one of the better thrillers to come out of the Afghan theater.

August 15, 2010

An Air Force major and female Army translator battle for survival in Afghanistan after their transport plane is shot down during a blizzard.

In this impressive first novel by a decorated former flight engineer who served in Iraq and Afghanistan with the Air National Guard, the conflict in Afghanistan is reduced in gripping personal terms to its basics: Man against man, man against nature, hope against despair, fear against itself. Major Michael Parson is the navigator of a C-130 Hercules carrying a high-ranking Taliban mullah to an interrogation center. After the plane is downed by a shoulder-launched missile and other surviving crew members are killed by insurgents, Parson and interpreter Gold escape with their shackled prisoner. Stranded in the bone-chilling wilds of the Hindu Kush, with no chance of rescue because of low visibility, they hole up in snow caves, nurse injuries and await the enemy. In a terrifying sequence in the first part of the book that brings Parson to tears, they are captured by the Taliban and about to be beheaded. An Afghan-American squad saves Parson but can't prevent the ruthless Marwan and his men from dragging off Gold. When orders from above make saving her a secondary priority, Parson goes after her alone. Ultimately, he is influenced by the sense of morality she maintains even after she is tortured. Young is an excellent storyteller, creating memorable characters with Hemingway-like understatement and precision. His descriptions of the terrain, the sound different weapons make, the feeling of fingers and toes succumbing to frostbite, the way thinks look through night vision goggles, are superb.

A smart, unsettling, timely novel that puts a human face on the Afghanistan conflict while conveying the immense challenges the United States faces there.

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September 1, 2010
Afghanistan is becoming the setting of choice for authors of military thrillers, and this suspenseful first novel makes excellent use of the strife-torn land. A plane carrying a Taliban prisoner, a radical mullah, is shot down over Afghanistan. Realizing the Taliban is closing in, the prisoners guards, Major Parson and Master Sergeant Gold, leave the wreckage and set out on foot across the treacherous landscape in the midst of a winter storm. Their goal is to get their prisoner to a nearby Special Forces outpost. Young served with the Air National Guard in Afghanistan and has written several nonfiction books about the military. Clearly, he knows his stuff, but even better, he knows how to build characters and structure a narrative. It is sometimes difficult to make military life appealing to civilian readers, but Young pulls it off. Fans of Stephen Coonts and Patrick Robinson should add Young to their must-read list immediately.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2010, American Library Association.)