Eye of the Archangel

January 8, 2007
In this sprightly early '60s spy thriller from Shamus-winner Max Phillips under his DeVoe pseudonym, the sequel to Into the Volcano
, repressed sexual tension between Jack Mallory, who works for the Consultancy, a freelance firm that acquires and sells world-class secrets, and Laura Morse, who's on loan from the CIA, threatens their partnership. (Laura thinks Jack thinks she's a lesbian, but is certain he'll never know one way or the other unless she tells him.) Add to this a young recruit who's uptight about being part "Negro," and the team has the potential for fractures that only tough professionalism can avoid. DeVoe successfully captures the feel and attitudes of the period in a novel closer to James Bond's glitz than to John le Carré gloom, as everybody chases a German scientist, a Nazi secret weapon and a fiendish international arms dealer through Monte Carlo and the Swiss Alps, with much ado about auto racing and the lifestyles of the very rich.

March 1, 2007
In this Cold War page-turner, pseudonymous author DeVoe (crime writer Max Phillips, cofounder of the Hard Case Crime imprint) tasks "Consultancy" superspies Jack Mallory and Laura Morse with infiltrating the organization of a former black marketeer called the Dane and stealing Archangel, a sophisticated satellite with the potential to change the balance of world power. The vile Dane and his colorful entourage display abundant adversarial prowess; Jack and Laura, meanwhile, boast a variety of rare skills while also suffering some humanizing psychological warts. In this reprise for Jack and Laura (after "Into the Volcano"), the numerous details DeVoe offers about weapons, food, drink, and architecture are less belabored than those found in books by Tom Clancy and Ian Fleming. However, action at the Grand Prix of Monaco does enable Laura to demonstrate astonishing Formula 1 racing competence while DeVoe establishes the 1963 time frame and expatiates on the racing milieu. A fast-paced plot moves all to an Alpine retreat, where evildoers meet their fate and the satellite is responsibly rerouted. The prose is taut and literate, and the characterizations are memorable (though Jack and Laura lack the humor of a Nick and Nora Charles). Recommended for all public libraries.Jonathan Pearce, California State Univ., Stanislaus

Copyright 2007 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

January 1, 2007
With his second Mallory & Morse adventure, DeVoe (a pseudonym for Hard Case Crime cofounder Max Phillips) delivers a finely crafted, if slow-building, homage to pre-le Carre espionage thrillers. He nails the tone of dead seriousness infused with a whiff of camp that marked a late-50s, early-60s era when it was tough to tell if the genre's writers were becoming hipper than its readers or vice versa. Jack Mallory and Laura Morse, operatives for freelance spy shop the Consultancy, must retrieve the superpowered Archangel satellite that's finally hitting the black market 18 years after it was presumed lost with Hitler's fall. It's off to Monaco for depressive, hard-living Texan Mallory. With Morse, martial-arts expert on loan from the CIA, tagging along, mainly as eye candy, Mallory cozies up to malevolent merchant Arne Jespers, who missed his Bond villain calling. From there, the story takes more twists than the Grand Prix on which Mallory makes a potentially deadly $50,000 wager. Readers will be excused for asking why anyone's bothering to rescue this genre from the Austin Powers parodists. But with DeVoe/Phillips pulling it off this well, why ask why?(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2007, American Library Association.)