Rad Decision, by James Aach. Book review

Edition reviewed, Impressive Imprint, 2006, ISBN 978-0-6151-3657-8.

Rad Decision is set in a fictitious nuclear power station in Indiana, USA, in 1986. There’s a walk-on part for Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, and a few scenes set at the Chernobyl reactor accident. All the main characters and events are fictional.

Fairview Station is a nuclear power station supplying 580 million watts of electricity to the US national grid. Unknown to its manager, Steve Borden, one of his team of trusted employees is a Soviet spy planted in the US almost ten years before and awaiting the signal for sabotage. In the aftermath of the Chernobyl accident, rogue elements in the Soviet espionage system order this agent, Vitaly Kruchinkin, to activate his plan to wreck Fairview. A mole has alerted the FBI to potential danger, but can agent Liz Rezhnitsky identify Kruchinkin in time? And if she fails, can Steve and his team of engineers prevent an accident turning into a disaster?

As I said in my review of Pompeii, I’m always pleased to see a thriller centred on an engineer rather than a spy or a soldier. In Rad Decision the technology and control systems of the power plant are central to the plot, not just unexplained shiny objects in the background to a gunfight. The author, James Aach, is an engineer with twenty years’ experience in the US nuclear power industry, and this no doubt explains the atmosphere of verisimilitude in the novel. My background is in the biological sciences, not power engineering, so I am utterly unqualified to judge whether the technical details are correct. They feel real, in the same way as a convincingly constructed historical novel feels real.

All necessary technical information is explained as the story unfolds, partly through the eyes of a recently qualified graduate engineer learning his way around Fairview Station, so the reader knows enough to understand the story but doesn’t get overwhelmed. The characters are neither entirely good nor entirely bad, regular guys (and gals) each with their own concerns and hopes. Even the saboteur is given convincing reasons for his actions. There are a lot of characters, with no single individual dominating the story, and some readers may miss having one or a few central characters to identify with. I personally liked having a range of people to get interested in, once I got used to the idea that there was a large cast.

I found the beginning rather confusing. The story threads that will eventually combine at Fairview Station in May 1986 begin with different people at different times and places, and as the narrative skips back and forth between them it can be hard to follow. I had to go back and read parts again as I’d forgotten who people were and whether I’d met them before. It settles down after about 30-40 pages, once the story has moved to Fairview as an operational plant and most of the cast are in place. I also found the story seemed rather slow to start, with a lot of build-up before we get to the main event.

Once the event happens, the tension becomes genuinely thrilling as the engineers race against time to repair the damage before Fairview goes into meltdown. Who could have thought that attempts to fix an oil pump and a diesel generator could have a reader like me, with no mechanical knowledge, on the edge of her chair? For me, this aspect of the novel was far more gripping than the espionage aspect. The FBI and the KGB get to play a role, as they do in any number of thrillers, but the real heroes of Rad Decision are the mechanics and engineers battling recalcitrant machinery in an effort to avert a disaster. Will they succeed? Will the fix work? Will something else go wrong? That’s where the suspense comes from. I was reminded of the film Apollo 13, which also manages to generate nail-biting suspense without recourse to conventional mayhem.

A gripping thriller, firmly rooted in the real world, that will also painlessly teach you a lot about nuclear power.

Has anyone else read it?

The Conscience of the King: Henry Gresham and the Shakespeare Conspiracy, by Martin Stephen. Book review

Edition reviewed: Little, Brown, 2003, ISBN 0-316-86002-6

Set in London and Cambridge in 1612-1613, at the court of King James I/VI* and in the slightly seedy underworld of London’s thriving theatre scene. The main characters, Sir Henry Gresham, his wife Jane and his faithful servant Mannion, are all fictional. Numerous historical figures feature as secondary characters, including William Shakespeare, Christopher Marlowe, James I/VI, Francis Bacon and Robert Cecil.

Sir Henry Gresham, gentleman and secret agent extraordinaire, is commissioned by the dying Robert Cecil to retrieve some compromising letters written by King James to his (homosexual) lover. Gresham knows the letters are only part of something much darker, connected in some unknown way with the vigorous and unruly new force of London’s theatres. Someone has already tried to murder actor and writer William Shakespeare, and Gresham himself and his wife are attacked on a visit to the Globe theatre. As Gresham unravels the net of deadly intrigue, a secret is revealed that reaches to the highest in the land, and that threatens the lives of Gresham, his beloved wife and even their two small children.

The Conscience of the King is a fast-paced spy thriller with an intricate plot and plenty of (often violent) action. It is told in straightforward prose with modern language and dialogue that doesn’t get in the way of the plot. If Tamburlaine Must Die was long on literary elegance and rather short on story, The Conscience of the King is the opposite way round.

The Conscience of the King should delight lovers of historical puzzles, cover-ups and conspiracy theories. Who really wrote the plays of Shakespeare? When and how did Christopher Marlowe really die? Why did the Globe Theatre really burn down in 1613? (No, of course the answers aren’t ‘Shakespeare’, ‘in a Deptford brawl in 1593’ or ‘by accident’. That would be much too simple). The author weaves these questions and their inventive answers into an espionage thriller with his fictional hero Henry Gresham at its heart. Spy thrillers are uniquely accommodating for fictional characters who interact decisively with real events and people. As long as the story stays mostly in the shadow-world behind the scenes, it doesn’t have to look for gaps in the historical records, since the whole premise is that the official version of history is not telling the whole truth. Naturally the fictional spy and his deeds would have been airbrushed out of the records, so the spy thriller has tremendous scope for invention. The Conscience of the King leaps into the possibilities with glee.

The characterisation is vivid and rather larger-than-life. Most of the politicians are thoroughly unpleasant (no great surprise there, perhaps), and the villain is an evil lunatic with not much in the way of redeeming features. Mannion is a paragon of loyalty and Gresham’s wife Jane seems almost too good to be true – beautiful, spirited, clever, courageous and loving. Gresham frequently reflects that he can’t believe his luck, and I’m afraid I had some trouble believing it too. Gresham himself is a sort of Jacobean James Bond. Handsome, rich, athletic, fearless, clever, ruthless, able to make a full recovery from serious injury, expert at violence and a master of intrigue and deception. I have the impression that male readers are supposed to identify with him and female readers are supposed to swoon. I’m afraid I didn’t swoon, though I can’t figure out why. One interesting contradiction in Gresham’s character is that he loves his wife and children dearly, yet he is hooked on the excitement of danger even though he knows this exposes his family to risk as his enemies will try to strike at him through them. Jane confronts him with this once, but then immediately apologises and backs away. I would have liked to see more of this dichotomy. James Bond was hardly a family man, and that inherent conflict has the potential to make Gresham an intriguing character. As the book is part of an ongoing series, perhaps it will be developed further elsewhere.

Apposite quotations from the King James Bible and the plays and poetry of Shakespeare at the head of each chapter add a neat touch. The epilogue, featuring a future scholar ‘discovering’ a lost letter from William Shakespeare among the Gresham archives in a Cambridge library seemed to me to be an unnecessary embellishment.

Action-packed spy thriller set at the court of King James I/VI in 17th-century England, with a James Bond-style hero and a plethora of historical conspiracy theories.



*James Stuart, son of Mary Queen of Scots and her second husband Lord Darnley, was King James VI of Scotland and King James I of England.