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Savage, Michael [Michael Alan Weiner].
A Time for War.
New York: St. Martin's Press, 2013.
ISBN 978-0-312-65162-6.
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The author, a popular talk radio host who is also a Ph.D.
in nutritional ethnomedicine and has published numerous books
under his own name, is best known for his political works,
four of which have made the New York Times bestseller list
including one which reached the top of that list. This is
his second foray into the fictional thriller genre, adopting
a style reminiscent of
Rudy Rucker's
transrealism,
in which the author, or a character closely modelled upon him or her,
is the protagonist in the story. In this novel, Jack Hatfield is a
San Francisco-based journalist dedicated to digging out the truth
and getting it to the public by whatever means available,
immersed in the quirky North Beach culture of San Francisco, and
banned in Britain for daring to transgress
the speech codes of that once-free nation. Sound familiar?
After saving his beloved San Francisco from an existential threat in
the first novel, Abuse of Power (June 2012),
Hatfield's profile on the national stage has become higher than ever,
but that hasn't helped him get back into the media game, where his
propensity for telling the truth without regard to political correctness
or offending the perennially thin-skinned makes him radioactive to mainstream outlets.
He manages to support himself as a free-lance investigative reporter,
working from his boat in a Sausalito marina, producing and selling
stories to venues willing to run them. When a Chinook helicopter
goes down in a remote valley in Afghanistan killing all 39 on board
and investigators attribute the crash to total failure of
all electronics on board with no evidence of enemy action, Jack's
ears perk up. When he later learns of an FBI vehicle performing
a routine tail of a car from the Chinese consulate being disabled
by “total electronic failure” he begins to get
really interested. Then strange things begin to happen
in Chinatown, prompting Jack to start looking for a China connection
between these incidents.
Meanwhile, Dover Griffith, a junior analyst at the Office of Naval Intelligence,
is making other connections. She recalled that a proposed wireless
Internet broadband system developed by billionaire industrialist
Richard Hawke's company had to be abandoned when it was discovered
its signal could induce catastrophic electrical failure in
aircraft electronics. (Clearly Savage is well-acquainted with the
sorry history of
LightSquared
and GPS interference!) When she begins to follow the trail, she
is hauled into her boss's office and informed she is being placed
on “open-ended unpaid furlough”: civil service speak
for being fired. Clearly Hawke has plenty of pull in high places
and probably something to hide. Since Hatfield had been all over
the story of interference caused by the broadband system and
the political battle over whether to deploy it, she decides to fly
to California and join forces with Hatfield to discover what is
really going on. As they, along with Jack's associates, begin to
peel away layer after layer of the enigma, they begin to suspect
that something even more sinister may be underway.
This is a thoroughly satisfying thriller. There is a great deal of
technical detail, all meticulously researched. There are a few dubious
aspects of some of the gadgets, but that's pretty much a given in
the thriller genre. What distinguishes these novels from other
high-profile thrillers is that Jack Hatfield isn't a superhero
in the sense of
Vince Flynn's
Mitch Rapp or
Brad Thor's
Scot Harvath: he is a largely washed-up journalist, divorced, living on a boat
with a toy poodle, hanging out with a bunch of eccentric characters
at an Italian restaurant in North Beach, who far from gunplay and derring-do,
repairs watches for relaxation. This makes for a different kind of thriller,
but one which is no less satisfying. I'm sure Jack Hatfield will be
back, and I'm looking forward to the next outing.
You can read this novel as a stand-alone thriller without having
first read Abuse of Power, but be warned that
it contains major plot spoilers for the first novel; to
fully enjoy them both, it's best to start there.
March 2013 