The Armageddon File

September 18, 2017
The villain of bestseller Coonts’s Liberty’s Last Stand was a thinly veiled stand-in for Barack Obama. Now, in this second headline-inspired thriller with a conservative slant, he sets his sights on the question of whether the 2016 election was rigged. Billionaire businessman Vaughn Conyer, a populist who’s never held elective office, has defeated Cynthia Hinton, who was “the establishment candidate, promising more of the same,” in an upset victory. Coonts’s series lead, CIA director Jake Grafton, assigns his agent sidekick, Tommy Carmellini, to an FBI task force investigating election fraud. Hinton’s supporters are claiming that foreign governments meddled in the election. Tommy is working with Maggie Miller, the special agent in charge of the task force, when they receive notice that a voting machine technician, Junior Sikes, has been jailed in Pennsylvania on kiddie porn charges and is willing to talk about his part in the voting machine chicanery. Before Junior can squeal, he and three others are whacked. Soon the body count stands at seven, and Tommy is dodging assassination attempts. Less vitriolic than Liberty’s Last Stand, this outing should have broader appeal, though Trump fans will enjoy it most. Agent: Deborah C. Grosvenor, Grosvenor Literary Agency.

October 1, 2017
Tommy Carmellini returns in this thriller based on the 2016 presidential election.CIA Director Jake Grafton ponders the shocking defeat of Cynthia Hinton by Vaughn Conyer, a New York billionaire with no political experience. Gasp! Ripped from the headlines! And Hinton must be Clinton! And Conyer must be--but alas, he's no Drump. Hoping to cut a deal for himself, jailed pedophile Junior Sikes asks for a visit from the FBI. He plans to snitch on his employer, voting machine maker American ElectTech, for having rigged the election results. But the "agent" who shows up puts a bullet in his brain before the real FBI can arrive. Although this doesn't look like the CIA's business, Grafton wants narrator Carmellini to look for a foreign connection, a task that receives only token attention. Carmellini's real CIA job is "technician," meaning he does dirty work wherever necessary. He "burgle[s] places" and delivers a fake subpoena, and when he impersonates a Federal Election Commissioner to get into the home of a political scientist who committed suicide, he finds a stack of printed spreadsheets labeled "Armageddon." Perhaps, he muses, it refers to the election as the "final battle between good and evil." He sounds like a wiseass PI straight out of pulp fiction. In one scene he slaps a guy, then says "Don't get all constipated on me, Kurt. We got a relationship going here." Then Kurt whispers, "The wrong person won the election." Later, Carmellini blows a bad guy's brains out with his .45 after he decides "Screw that first-shot crap." As subtly as a train wreck, the author, through Carmellini, compares today's progressive left with World War II fascists: "Both hated free speech," blah, blah. And there's the evil, near-nonagenarian billionaire and one-time SS Hitlerite Anton Hunt, who now supports left-wing causes and may have tried to fix the election for Clin--er, Hinton.If you believe a criminal lost the White House in 2016, give Coonts' (Liberty's Last Stand, 2016, etc.) latest a try. But be warned: it won't make American literature great again.

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