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Anonymous
Posted June 7, 2008
Jason Ender, a senior-level interrogator of prisoners of the Guantanamo type, is sent to a godforsaken base in the horn of Africa to help determine which, if any, of several prisoners might be a key enemy leader. When he arrives he finds that the main interrogator he was to work with, an attractive lieutenant, has committed suicide only hours earlier, for no obvious reason. Suspicions aroused, he finds loads of suspects, leads, and possible evidence indicating her death might not have been an accident. The story becomes Ender's efforts to find the cause of the lieutenant's death and those responsible (and why). There is no need to provide details here and plenty reason not to: the story is a murder mystery and generally observes the expected form, including a twist or two at the end. At the same time, the mystery is indeed set within the so-called global war on terror, complete with multiple levels of bureaucracy, military personnel and civilians with different agendas, and endlessly complex and perplexing tactical and strategic milieus. For fans of such stuff the book would be satisfying for these reasons alone. To this lay reader, the author convincingly depicts all these variables, down to the mind-set and speech characteristics of the people involved. The text is cleanly written with almost no typos or grammar glitches, and the characters' motivations, actions, and words are well thought out. They all speak in pretty much the same overwrought manner, however. Even the uneducated low-lifes glibly elaborate their speech a la Oscar Wilde, had he only been in the U.S. military. Some of these quips and some narrative stretches I found all too often completely opaque, requiring rereading, sometimes more than once. Maybe that's just me. Some may find such high style I found it weak editing. Take, for example, the blurb on the back of the book. Blurbs are hard to write, but this one, which was mostly lifted verbatim from passages in the book, makes almost no sense at all. It makes a good, quick test. Those who find the blurb no problem should enjoy Echo Five with no qualification.
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Posted May 19, 2012
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