From Publishers WeeklyThe author of Crossfire sets his fast-paced new thriller in motion with an exciting scenario: an embittered Hiroshima survivor's attempt to explode nuclear devices in San Francisco and Los Angeles on the anniversaries of the two atomic bomb attacks that ended WW II. In Paris, former CIA assassin Kirk McGarvey sees his lover's plane shot down by a Stinger missile fired by a team of East German assassins in the employ of madman Isowa Makkamura. Seeking revenge, McGarvey begins to pick up Makkamura's trail after a brutal killing in Tokyo, but the East Germans kidnap his ex-wife and daughter to throw him off the track. The bloody effort to rescue the two women obscures the main plot line for a while, but McGarvey eventually confronts Makkamura in Tokyo, then joins him on a deadly flight across the Pacific before the book's final crisis, which is resolved only in the final sentence. McGarvey may be a little too superhuman--and the villains too evil by half--to be believed, but tension never lags in this certified page-turner. Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc. From Kirkus ReviewsVengeful Japanese cowboy/industrialist seeks to build A-bomb; vengeful American cowboy/agent seeks to thwart same--in this expert rouser from dependable Hagberg (Countdown, 1990; Crossfire, 1991). After losing his parents in Hiroshima and his wife and daughter in Nagasaki, Isawa Nakamura resurfaces decades later as a self-made computer kingpin with the clout to take out three inconvenient CIA men on a Swissair jetliner with a surface-to-air missile. Also aboard is Marta Fredericks, girlfriend of retired Company op Kirk McGarvey, who goes on a cold-killing rampage. Nakamura's goons kill American agents by the carload, kidnap McGarvey's estranged wife Kathleen and adoring daughter Elizabeth, and use them as bait in a killing trap--since they naturally know who's on their trail and how fearsome he is. There must be a hundred killers, armed with the latest high-tech weaponry, arrayed against McGarvey, but they haven't got a prayer. (As Elizabeth confidently'' tells a kidnaper:My father is going to tear you a new asshole, sweety.'') Nothing can stop McGarvey: certainly not the French and American spooks set on his trail (he thumbs his nose at them, then signs on under his own terms), or a CIA info blackout (a Twinkie-loving hacker lets him in the back door), or the trap set by chief henchmen Ernst Spranger and icy lesbian temptress Liese Egk (McGarvey shrugs off the Navy SEALS dispatched to the Greek islands to help him--they naturally blunder into the trap in his place--and takes out the last thug with his last bullet), or the resulting wounds, which are supposed to keep him bedridden--and the bomb assembly thereby on track--for six weeks (he's en route to Japan two days later for the equally predictable showdown). Japan-bashing at its most cartoon-heroic, written with an eye for the fast clich‚. Not really good for you, or for international relations, but there's no point in fighting Hagberg's crudely effective force. -- Copyright ©1992, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

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