** spoiler alert ** Somewhere slightly above Cussler, slightly below Crichton, well below Ludlum. Fun adventure about a non-spy caught up in a spy's world, possibly seeded with too many "I have a name and some quick charisma, please care about me before my death in a couple hundred pages" characters.

Lost a star for the inane evangelical villain, a wing nut seeking to bring about Armageddon via remote control. There are religions that sanction such ideas, but Christianity is not one of them. Reich uses a cheap stock caricature who is completely safe to demonize, while giving the high moral ground to his Doctor Without Borders protagonist. Try to be a little surprising here: make the Doctors Without Borders guy the villain.

Also, when the big reveal happens, the relationship between woolly-eyed husband and not really dead spy wife is completely new, creative, fresh, and original. And what I mean by new, creative, original, and fresh is more of the same "I don't know who you are anymore." "Yes you do. Behind the deep, dark, secret of a double life is the same person you knew before. Except I kill people a lot." kind of shtick. So yeah, not fresh. Do something new: husband can't take it, and shoots wife. Or he just leaves, and the couple doesn't go from soul-searching agony to partners in spy-crime in two paragraphs.

But summer is for reading free spy novels, and I had fun.