- Thor, Brad.
The Lions of Lucerne.
New York: Pocket Books, 2002.
ISBN 978-0-7434-3674-8.
-
This was the author's first published novel, which introduced
Scot Harvath, the ex-Navy SEAL around whose exploits his subsequent
thrillers have centred. In the present book, Harvath has been
recruited into the Secret Service and is in charge of the U.S. president's
advance team and security detail for a ski trip to Utah which goes
disastrously wrong when an avalanche wipes out the entire Secret Service
field team except for Harvath, leaving the president missing and his
daughter grievously injured. This shock is compounded manyfold when
evidence indicates that the president has been kidnapped in an
elaborate plot, which is soon confirmed by an incontrovertible communication
from the kidnappers.
If things weren't bad enough for the seriously battered Harvath, still
suffering from a concussion and “sprained body”, he finds himself
framed as the person who leaked the security arrangements to the kidnappers
and for the murder of two people trying to bring evidence regarding the
plot to the attention of the authorities.
Harvath decides the only way he can clear his name is to get to the bottom
of the conspiracy and rescue the president himself and so, grasping at the
only thread of evidence he has, travels incognito to Switzerland, where
he begins to unravel the details of the plot, identify the conspirators, and
discover where the president is being held and devise a plan to rescue him.
You don't often come across a Swiss super-villain, but there's one here,
complete with an Alpine redoubt worth of a Bond blackguard.
This is a first novel, and it shows. Thor's mastery of the craft of the
thriller, both in storytelling and technical detail, has improved
over the years. If I hadn't read two of the more recent books,
I might have been inclined to give it up after this one, but knowing
what's coming, I'll continue to enjoy books from this series. In the present
story, we have a vast disparity between the means (an intricate and extremely
risky plot to kidnap the U.S. president) and the ends (derailing the passage
of an alternative energy bill like “cap and trade”), carried out
by an international conspiracy so vast that its security would almost
be certain to be quickly compromised, but which is, instead, revealed through
a series of fantastically improbable coincidences. Scot Harvath is pursued
by two independent teams of assassins who may be the worst shots in the
entire corpus of bestselling thrillers. And the Swiss authorities simply
letting somebody go who smuggled a gun into Switzerland, sprayed gunfire
around a Swiss city (damaging a historical landmark in the process), and then
broke into a secret Swiss military base doesn't sound like the Switzerland
with which I'm acquainted.
Still, this is well deserving of the designation
“thriller”, and it will keep you turning the pages.
It only improves from here, but I'd start with one of the more
recent novels.
October 2010 