The Spoils of War

By Gordon Kent

Book Overview

An exhilarating tale of modern espionage and adventure featuring US Navy intelligence officer Alan Craik.

In Tel Aviv, Commander Alan Craik, a US Navy veteran agrees to check out the death of a former Navy enlisted employee. He plans to be out the door and on to his real work in half an hour. But the task quickly turns dangerous, and what should have been a routine investigation becomes something very ugly.

Nominal American allies in Israel withhold or alter information; nominal colleagues at home set up their own operation to satisfy the political needs of Washington; a wife betrays her husband and deceit and distrust prove to be the only common denominator.

When Mike Dukas, a dogged, cynical special agent of the Naval Criminal Investigative Service joins the investigation, it leads them all from Tel Aviv to Gaza and the Greek island of Lesvos to Jerry Piat, a renegade CIA officer.

With agents of Mossad and the Palestinian Authority always close behind them, Alan Craik demands the answers to some far-reaching questions. What are the rules in modern conflict? Where is honour? And what is the cost of telling the truth?

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0007178735
• ISBN13: 9780007178735
• Release Date: July 2007
• Publisher: Harper
• Length: 512 Pages
• Weight: 0.54 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.3" x 4.4" x 6.8"

Customer Reviews

Dark but where's the dawn?

This is a rather odd book coming after half a dozen others which were focused on the US navy and its aircraft. No dogfights in this one and not an aircraft carrier in sight. It seems to represent a new theme for the author(s) which is carried into the Falconer's Tale - espionage without much glamor. James Bond-style suave certainty is also very much absent from rather a dark and foreboding tale. Post 9/11 and Alan Craik and his friends are still here but the mood has changed. There's an air of bitterness because the moral compass which identified America as something to believe in and something to fight for has been tossed out of the window by opportunists who used the event to justify their own agenda; people who have no qualms about becoming that thing they are supposedly fighting in order to gain their objectives. Sounds familiar? Yes, it's rather close to the truth as it begins to emerge and reflects the way American people start to ask just exactly what they signed up for in the hysteria following the collapse of the twin towers. Craik and his friends witness those changes early and close up, and they don't like what they see. But they still have a job to do and they are not going to compromise their ideals. The inevitable result is frustration, burn-out and failure. There are few neat happy endings in such a world and this book doesn't contrive one. The overall feeling is one in which the authors, themselves familiar with the world of intelligence from previous experience, are sounding a warning about what America has become, when truth and morality are thrown out for the lure of expediency. They don't like what they see either and that comes across very clearly in the tone of the book and the transference of ideals onto their principal characters. Which is not to say the book is boring. It isn't. Slower paced than previous works, it is still a compelling read, in part because of the underlying truth and in part because of the abilities of Gordon Kent to write an absorbing tale with believable characters who are far removed from the cardboard cutout stereotypes of many such works. Read it but don't look for the cavalry to come to the rescue in the last couple of pages. It's not that sort of book.