ORACLE | Kirkus Reviews

Rainer offers the eighth continent-spanning installment in his Jeff Trask thriller series, in which the hero must help avert a plan for nuclear armageddon.

In 2021, CIA agent “Buck” Buckley is mere months into a new posting in Athens, Greece, when Yuri Mikhail Gilfoy, a senior Mossad official from Tel Aviv, appears. Yuri hasn’t left his office to catch up with an old friend. Instead, he warns Buck about recent intel he’s received from an anonymous source, nicknamed “Oracle,” regarding a possible nuclear attack. The Supreme Leader of the Islamic Republic of Iran, it appears, aims to take retaliatory measures following the signing of the Abraham Accords in 2020, in which several Arabic nations recognized the state of Israel and agreed to normalize relations. Yuri’s source has suggested that Athens, the “original cradle of Western civilization and democracy,” represents a likely target. Shortly after delivering this jaw-dropping news, Yuri departs, leaving Buck and his colleagues at the U.S. embassy to brace for any possibility. Meanwhile, in Tehran, a former champion wrestler-turned-colonel of the Iran Revolutionary Guards, Ahmed Jafari, plays games of Football Megastars online and keeps his head down as the Supreme Leader speculates about a mole in his office. Back in Kansas City, Missouri, Assistant U.S. Attorney Jeff Trask and his wife, Lynn, prepare for a long-awaited vacation to Greece—where they become entangled in Rainer’s serpentine narrative. Over the course of this espionage thriller, the author ably weaves together the various threads of his capacious and complex international doomsday narrative. Some readers may be surprised that the chief player is not Trask; indeed, it isn’t any one character, but more of an ensemble piece, and the action moves too fast for any real interior character development. However, the author’s sleek, propulsive prose effectively drives readers toward a promised climax. Some bits of dialogue feel a bit clichéd, but for this, Rainer can be forgiven, as the book is clearly written in the spirit of good, gripping fun. In this sense, it’s successful—explosively so.

An often engrossing spy novel on an international scale.