Armed and Dangerous

May 21, 2007
After his bestselling debut, Under and Alone
(also coauthored by Century), Queen, a retired Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms agent, returns with a less successful effort. Here Queen goes back to his early days with ATF, describing his obsessive 1985 quest to take down Mark Stephens, “equal parts gunman, mountain man, drug trafficker, and out-and-out thug.” As laudatory as the effort to apprehend Stephens was, the story is too slight to sustain even a brief book, which might explain why Queen fills it out with discussions of unrelated investigations he pursued while waiting for approval to go up into the mountains after his quarry. He also seems to devote as much time to his arguments with his superiors as to the effort to ascend the rugged terrain in the mountains of Southern California where Stephens was hiding out, and the anticlimactic conclusion of their encounter is disappointing. Queen relies on an uncorroborated account from an ex-con and associate of Stephens's for a section that makes Stephens seem truly psychotic. The passing references to the toll the agent's hard-charging style took on his marriage could have been better developed.

July 1, 2007
ATF agent Queen seemed the only one likely to apprehend pot-grower and accomplished survivalist Mark Stephens in 1986. As polished by Century, Queens rat-a-tat prose suggests the automatic weapons fire Stephens had employed in terrorizing the towns of Californias Inland Empire before relocating permanently to the wilderness. Besides his adeptness at living in the wild, Stephens made his own machine guns (a hobby, an interesting pastime) and grew pot plants 10 to 12 feet tall. Queen matched Stephens in survival and tracking skills, and the two mens similarities greatly enliven the story of their conflict. In fact, the standoff after which Stephens was taken into custody might have ended more quickly had Stephens not thought that Queen, with his long, curly hair looked more like a drug-crazed hippie bent on stealing his dope than like a lawman. A ripping good manhunt saga, detailed and suspenseful, not at all dimished by the deflationary fact that Stephens plea-bargained down to a single possession of illegal weapons count and got only five years in federal prison.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2007, American Library Association.)