The Last Refuge

May 28, 2012
Readers fond of unrealistic bravado and female intelligence operatives with outstanding physical assets will best appreciate Coes’s third Dewey Andreas novel (after 2011’s Coup d’Etat). The events of the previous book, in which former Delta Force member Andreas helped depose the president of Pakistan, shape a predictable effort to stop Iran from nuking Israel. Andreas must not only avert nuclear war in the Middle East but also somehow rescue kidnap victim Kohl Meir (a great-grandson of Israeli PM Golda Meir), who saved Andreas’s life in Pakistan, from a well-guarded prison in Iran. Steamy if stock exposition (e.g., “He looked at her panties, with their thin lace edges, then Jessica’s stomach, toned but not muscular, with the tiniest bit of voluptuous curve, above it her big breasts, the nape of her neck, finally her eyes, which still held the same contemptuous stare”) makes up only in part for the lack of genuinely suspenseful moments or surprises. 100,000 first printing. Agent: Nicole James, the Aaron M. Priest Literary Agency.

October 1, 2012
In Coes's latest thriller, Israeli special forces commander Kohl Meir is kidnapped in New York City and transported to an Iranian prison. The kidnapping is all part of an Iranian plan to deploy a nuclear weapon in Tel Aviv. And when the politically astute, plain-thinking United States president suffers a fatal heart attack and is replaced by a naïve vice president, it's up to former Army Ranger Dewey Andreas to save the day. Narrator Peter Hermannâwho ably creates a range of accents and dialects for the book's international castâdelivers an appropriately gruff, hard-boiled delivery. But the unrelenting grimness of his narration creates such a downbeat mood that even Andreas's astonishing accomplishments fall a bit short of triumph. A St. Martin's hardcover.