Shakedown

March 15, 2020
Ex-Navy SEAL Brett Garrett and ex-FBI agent Valerie Mayberry, each disgraced in their respective field, go outside of official channels to avert a devastating threat to the United States. The murder of an Iranian scientist who lived in a condo down the hall from Garrett primes the plot of this geopolitical thriller, which involves a criminally connected Russian oil billionaire; an evil Iranian general who was "conceived in a brutal rape"; a Palestinian father-daughter assassination team out to avenge the killing of the rest of their family in an Israeli bombing; and an Islamic terrorist recruited by Iran to detonate a nuclear device on a "ghost" submarine off the coast of Virginia. Back from Gingrich and Earley's Collusion (2019), Brett and Valerie are quite the duo. He is an opioid-addicted Afghanistan and black ops veteran whose torture/murder of Russian general Andre Gromyko (Gingrich's backhanded salute to the late, real-life Soviet foreign minister?) led to his ouster from the SEALs. She is an obsessive, oxycodone-popping beauty (her partner thinks she resembles Keri Russell of TV's The Americans, but she acts more like Claire Danes on Homeland) who has to cope with permanent nerve damage from a gas attack on the U.S. Senate. Though the authors are happy to install a na�ve president with the name Randle Fitzgerald, their political commentary is largely restrained--Fitzgerald's party affiliation is not revealed. This is, at its best, an action thriller, with a full share of bang-up scenes (and at least one torture too many). And though former House Speaker Gingrich and Earley have a nagging tendency to have characters verbalize plot details (as in "Remind me, Petrov, how many fights did you win before we were released?" and "You mean, before your father bribed three judges to erase our crimes?"), they keep the story afloat. An entertaining, if coldhearted, international thriller.

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March 23, 2020
In bestsellers Gingrich and Earley’s unoriginal sequel to 2019’s Collusion, former Navy SEAL Brett Garrett and sidekick Valerie Mayberry, who has recently been fired from the FBI, are surprised to learn that a Middle Eastern terrorist they thought the Israelis killed is not only alive but has just murdered Brett’s neighbor, a dissident Iranian nuclear physicist, in Washington, D.C. Meanwhile, a Russian oligarch has purchased a used Russian submarine and an Iranian nuclear device that he intends to deploy against the U.S. For help dealing with the terrorist and the oligarch, Brett turns to his pal Thomas Jefferson Kim, the head of Intel-Eye-Check, a cybersecurity firm, who handles the usual computer wizardry. On the personal side, Brett and Valerie spend a lot of time trading insults to hide their burgeoning attraction. Plenty of action and solid prose, along with plenty of intriguing little-known historical and technical facts, make up in part for such stock elements as an unscrupulous Washington reporter and a high-level government traitor. Political thriller fans who have no problem with knowing what’s going to happen next will be satisfied. Agents: Kathy G. Lubbers, Lubbers Agency and David Vigliano, AGI Vigliano Literary.