- Thor, Brad.
Code of Conduct.
New York: Atria Books, 2015.
ISBN 978-1-4767-1715-9.
-
This is the fifteenth in the author's
Scot
Harvath series, which began with
The Lions of Lucerne (October 2010).
In this novel, the author “goes big”, with a thriller
whose global implications are soundly grounded in genuine documents of
the anti-human “progressive” fringe and endorsed, at least
implicitly, by programmes of the United Nations.
A short video, recorded at a humanitarian medical clinic in the Congo, shows
a massacre of patients and staff which seems to make no sense at all. The
operator of the clinic retains the Carlton Group to investigate the attack on
its facility, and senior operative Scot Harvath is dispatched to lead a
team to find out what happened and why. Murphy's Law applies
at all times and places, but Murphy seems to pull extra shifts in the Congo,
and Harvath's team must overcome rebels, the elements, and a cast-iron
humanitarian to complete its mission.
As pieces of evidence are assembled, it becomes clear that the Congo massacre
was a side-show of a plot with global implications, orchestrated by a cabal
of international élites and supported by bien
pensants in un-elected senior administrative positions in governments.
Having bought into the anti-human agenda, they are willing to implement a
plan to “restore equilibrium” and “ensure sustainability”
whatever the human toll.
This is less a shoot-'em-up action thriller (although there is some of that, to
be sure), than the unmasking of a hideous plot and take-down of it once it is
already unleashed. It is a thoroughly satisfying yarn, and many readers may not
be aware of the extent to which the goals advocated by the villains have been
openly stated by senior officials of both the U.S. government and international
bodies.
This is not one of those thrillers where once the dust settles things are left
pretty much as they were before. The world at the end of this book will have
been profoundly changed from that at the start. It will be interesting to see how
the author handles this in the next volume in the series.
For a high-profile summer thriller by a blockbuster author from a major publishing
house (Atria is an imprint of Simon & Schuster), which debuted at number 3
on the New York Times Best Sellers list, there are a surprising number
of copy editing and factual errors, even including the platinum standard, an idiot
“It's” on p. 116. Something odd appears to have happened in formatting
the Kindle edition (although I haven't confirmed that it doesn't also affect the
print edition): a hyphen occasionally appears at the end of lines, separated by a
space from the preceding word, where no hyphenation is appropriate, for example:
“State - Department”.
July 2015 