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Summary
Summary
Alex Berenson's best-selling debut thriller earned him the 2007 Edgar Award for Best First Novel. In his second book, Berenson brings back powerhouse CIA operative John Wells for more high-stakes intrigue and explosive action. After proving his mettle obliterating an al-Qaeda camp in Afghanistan, Wells must return to that strife-ridden land to fight a new crop of evil-doers-including deadly emissaries from China, North Korea, and Iran.
Author Notes
Alex Berenson was born on January 6, 1973. He graduated from Yale University in 1994 with degrees in history and economics. After college, he became a reporter for the Denver Post. In 1996, he became one of the first employees at TheStreet.com, the financial news website. In 1999, he became a reporter for The New York Times. While there he covered topics ranging from the occupation of Iraq to the flooding of New Orleans to the financial crimes of Bernie Madoff. He left the Times in 2010 to concentrate on writing fiction, but he occasionally contributes to the newspaper.
His first book, The Faithful Spy, won the 2007 Edgar Award for Best First Novel. His other works include The John Wells series and the nonfiction books The Number and The Prisoner.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Having foiled an al-Qaeda plot targeting Times Square in 2006's The Faithful Spy (which won an Edgar Award for best first novel), maverick CIA agent John Wells confronts a very different threat in this pulse-pounding sequel from New York Times reporter Berenson. When the CIA's efforts to extract Dr. Sung Kwan, a North Korean scientist and an invaluable source on Kim Jong Il's nuclear ambitions, result in the deaths of Kwan and the rescue team, Wells's significant other, Jennifer Exley, searches to identify the person in U.S. intelligence who compromised Kwan's security. Meanwhile, Wells returns to Afghanistan, the scene of much of the action in The Faithful Spy, to find out what outside country has been helping the Taliban reassert itself. While the mole hunt will be familiar to genre buffs and the characters and the perils they face aren't as nuanced as those in John le Carre or even David Ignatius, the author's plausible scenario distinguishes this from most spy thrillers. Author tour. (Feb.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Kirkus Review
John Wells, who saved America's bacon in Berenson's The Faithful Spy (2006), returns, incompletely recovered from his Times Square showdown with Islamic terrorists. Tortured by the violence of his years as a double agent, Wells still craves action and excitement: He routinely rises from the bed he shares with comely intelligence agent Jennifer Exley for high-speed midnight rides on his huge motorcycle. Not to worry because real action is on the way. There's been a disaster off the coast of North Korea, where what was to have been the extraction of America's best intelligence source has gone completely wrong. All hands were lost when a bug planted on the rescued scientist put the rescue team squarely in the sights of a Korean submarine. How the scientist came to be bugged and why he was betrayed has everything to do with why Wells is recalled to service along with his lady friend. It is becoming clear that great international mischief is afoot, and Wells has the right combination of fluent Arabic and nearly superhuman strength to begin unraveling the anti-American plot, requiring the agent to fly to Afghanistan and join in a small deadly strike on hidden Taliban fighters. Numerous bodies bite the dust before Wells snares the Taliban's Russian consultants. Russians? Indeed. They are part of the machinery set in motion by General Li Ping, the only man at the top of the Chinese Communist party who is not on the take. Li's plan to bring about fair distribution of the new national wealth involves not only those Russians, but a mole at the CIA whose treachery has blinded the agency at the worst possible time. Terrific and relentless suspense and action in a reasonably credible plot. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
Berenson, winner of the 2007 Edgar Award for his first novel, The Faithful Spy, proves his debut was no fluke with this stellar sequel. John Wells has recovered physically from the wounds he suffered in The Faithful Spy, but the mental scars still linger. To get back in the game, he takes an assignment in Afghanistan to investigate recent Taliban activity. What he uncovers shocks him and will lead to a disastrous attempt to recover a CIA undercover agent in North Korea and to the discovery of a mole in the CIA who is feeding secrets to a ruthless general in the Chinese government, who is, in turn, using the mole's intel to his own benefit. Wells is a fascinating, tortured soul, and his attempts to live a normal life create a gripping narrative. The authenticity Berenson brings to his ripped-from-the-headlines stories makes them seem as vividly real and scary as nonfiction or the nightly news.--Ayers, Jeff Copyright 2008 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
Alex Berenson's new thriller forecasts dangers to come. WHILE the United States remains focused on the Middle East, China quietly and relentlessly creeps forward as a national security challenge. Its economic rise is being followed by its military rise. In 2006, a Chinese Songclass attack submarine, equipped with Russianmade wakehoming torpedoes, stalked the U.S.S. Kitty Hawk carrier strike group in the Pacific. The sub surfaced within firing range before being detected only five miles from the carrier itself. In 2007, the Chinese destroyed one of their aging weather satellites with a missile effectively ending decades of debate over whether space would be militarized. In "The Ghost War," the New York Times reporter Alex Berenson has fashioned a smart, economically written spy novel that imagines a future clash with the Chinese. As such, it's a novel for policy wonks, with a very sophisticated vision of how a conflict with China could come about, akin to the kind of wargaming scenarios that occupy Washington strategists. Here, a power struggle between the military and civilian wings of the Chinese leadership and the accidental ramming of a Chinese trawler by an American destroyer ignite an unwelcome conflict. Adding to the complexity is a new alliance between China and Iran, a secret one between China and the Taliban, the attempted defection of a North Korean spy to the West and the usual moles on each side. The plot moves quickly, in tight, essayistic paragraphs that show Berenson's command of such disparate worlds as the United States Navy and Chinese migrant workers. I once spent a month aboard a destroyer in the Pacific and can attest to the accuracy of the author's portrayal of one. His description of a semistarving Chinese laborer who starts a riot, and whose only memory of home and his dead parents is a baseball hat that a policeman grabs from him, is vivid and moving. Elsewhere, Berenson offers an intriguing account of a meeting of the Chinese leadership in a banquet hall that's "drab" on the outside, but on the inside "seemed to have been transported directly from Versailles." Here, China's small band of rulers guzzle down a halfcase of 1992 Château Lafitte at 10,000 yuan, or $1,300, a bottle. "Li sipped his wine," Berenson writes. "His father Hu had worked at a tire factory until his heart gave out on his 52nd birthday. Hu hadn't made 10,000 yuan in his entire life." Li Ping, the head of the People's Liberation Army, is Berenson's most studied character: an abstemious military man who would rather be drinking freshly squeezed orange juice than expensive wine, who exercises constantly, and who wants China's new wealth to be more evenly distributed among its poor, especially during a shortterm economic slowdown. Li's purity fuses with his political extremism. He concocts a plot to draw China into a limited war with the United States, in order to oust the more personally decadent and freemarketoriented members of the Standing Committee. The conflict feeds Chinese nationalism and resentment after the trawler is accidentally rammed "Hegemonists apologize! No more American war crimes!" the crowds in Beijing cry. When the crisis gets out of control, China's military modernization allows for a submarinelaunched torpedo to elude the Navy's electronic defenses and hit the errant destroyer. As Berenson explains, "Until a few years before, China's armed forces had relied on leaky ships, rusting submarines and fighter jets whose design dated from the Korean War." That was all changing, Berenson continues, now that Chinese students in engineering and software at America's top universities were returning home to China; some were going to work for their country's navy, which was now concentrating on undersea warfare, rather than going headtohead with the United States to develop carriers and other surface warships. In reality, when it comes to asymmetrical warfare, there are two ends of the spectrum: the roadside bombs of the Iraqi insurgency represent the crude, lowtech end, and the Chinese, with their focus on submarines, ballistic missiles and space weaponry, are poised to demonstrate the subtle, hightech end. The object is not a war with America, but rather the ability to deny the United States Navy complete access to coastal Asia. But even this would not be enough to start a limited war. As the novel suggests, China's military development will merely create the conditions for a conflict; the conflict itself could arise only through power plays that lead to accidents and miscalculations. Berenson is also geopolitically savvy, and maps out how a single crisis can ripple across several regions. In a fluid, global world, it makes sense that a conflict beginning in Asia soon takes on a Middle East angle, too, owing to trade and military links between eastern and western Asia. Like many novels of this genre, "The Ghost War" is too mechanical in its plot and lacks the baroque character development for which John le Carré is famous. The protagonist, a Central Intelligence Agency officer named John Wells, is a twodimensional variation of derringdo types common to other spy books. (Much more successful is Berenson's study of the American mole, Keith Robinson, whose family tragedy leads him in stages to betray his country.) Moreover, the lavish descriptions of military technicalities can sometimes be distracting from the plot and the characters themselves. But Berenson is not trying to be le Carré. Rather, he displays a reporter's fine awareness of headlines over the horizon. Robert D. Kaplan is a national correspondent for The Atlantic and a senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security.
Library Journal Review
Having infiltrated an al-Qaeda cell in The Faithful Spy and single-handedly short-circuited a terrorist attack, CIA agent John Wells returns bearing the 2007 Edgar for Best First Novel. Now he's back in Afghanistan, countering troublemakers from China, Korea, and Iran-and a mole in the CIA. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.