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Assassin (Kirk McGarvey, #6)

David Hagberg

Why we're reading this: Book 6. McGarvey goes to Russia to try eliminate the second coming of Lenin. Problem is the DDO has decid…more
[close] Book 6. McGarvey goes to Russia to try eliminate the second coming of Lenin. Problem is the DDO has decided to use the opportunity to fix him one way or another.

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Sep 04, 2013 Samuel rated it it was ok

REVOLTING READ

David Hagberg. He's the poor man's Tom Clancy but he does well in writing what I shall call "espionage pulp fiction". It's cliché as hell but compared to say, the Alex Hawke series? The Kirk McGarvey series is entertaining. Unfortunately, this is the first book where Hagberg had a serious stumble (he had two more and 2013-14, only recovering with the upcoming book this year). "Assassin" embodies what is wrong with this thriller. From the mundane title, occasional cheesy moments, t REVOLTING READ

David Hagberg. He's the poor man's Tom Clancy but he does well in writing what I shall call "espionage pulp fiction". It's cliché as hell but compared to say, the Alex Hawke series? The Kirk McGarvey series is entertaining. Unfortunately, this is the first book where Hagberg had a serious stumble (he had two more and 2013-14, only recovering with the upcoming book this year). "Assassin" embodies what is wrong with this thriller. From the mundane title, occasional cheesy moments, to the bad plotting and worse characterization (Hagberg's ultimate weakness as a writer is in full on display here) and a shattering of the suspension of disbelief, this I wouldn't recommend this thriller to anyone at all. There's stretching the suspension of disbelief and then there's blowing it to pieces. It's a bad book and can be seen as a cautionary tale for what happens when an story takes a lethal overdoes of conventions which have been done to death. Now to the review. What happened if a mad man with a plan decided to try bring Russia back to the days of Stalin.

The story is this. We have an ardent Stalinist gallivanting around Russia in an armored train (similar to Leon Trotsky in the Russian Civil War) networking and trying to undermine the democratic government. They try to stop him and he sends his personal shooter to have Boris Yelstin whacked. Having done so, a mid-level official at the SVR takes matters into his own hands and concocts a plan to take out the extremist. Flying to Paris, he contracts the job of killing the Stalinist to Kirk McGarvey. Unfortunately, their actions catch the eyes of the SDECE and the CIA where McGarvey's enemies in the company's top brass hit upon the "genius" idea of trying to use his daughter to stop him from completing the hit.

PLOT:
It's there but it isn't the best the author has done. A comedy of critical errors would be a more suitable description of what happens here. We have the SVR man who gets compromised and inadvertently dooms the original plan to the Russian government finally doing what it could have done at the beginning of the book and using their MIG-29's to blast the main antagonist's armored train just for starters. The plot twists can be seen from a mile away and all this is combined with dialogue that would make you cringe with embarrassment at how corny it is.

CHARACTERS:
The one great weakness of the Kirk McGarvey series. Time has passed but even now, the cast in this book is shockingly awful for a spy thriller. We reach the climax of the grudge the CIA top brass has with McGarvey and thankfully, they pay for it in a humiliating fashion, reduced to tearfully begging his closest associate for him to stop. Next, we have the Russian protagonists. Tom Clancy may have written up door-stoppers by the late 1990's but at least his Russian characters were damn competent at their jobs. Hagberg, by contrast, turns them into dithering idiots which allows the main antagonist to run rings around them (that Yelstin killing was only possible due to bad advice causing them to dither at blowing the villian off the face of Siberia).
Then there's the antagonists themselves. Stock characters. Very boring. And he uses some dated stereotypes for the characterization of one of them.
As for the female characters. The author outdid himself with making them as stupid as possible. First we have a female SDECE officer who Hagberg plays up as "smart" and "competent". Utter b******* if you ask me and see how easy it is for the antagonists to screw her over. Then there's Kirk McGarvey's daughter, Elizabeth. Just as dumb as the first one, she gets back into the role of "damsel in distress" which she took in her last role. Hagberg also gives her some of the worst dialogue in the book which makes her annoying as hell. It takes several more books till he kills her off but that's another story.
Only one good character. Otto Renecke. Oddball? Yes. Still has some annoying verbal tics? Unfortunately so. But he's so much more likable than all the other secondary characters, with more personality and competence than all of them combined. Last but not least, we have McGarvey. As far as technothriller protagonists go, I don't like him and he still has his unpleasant traits that I talked about in the previous books. Tom Clancy's John Clark is a thousand times more well rounded character. But in this book, Hagberg takes Kirk's badass traits and goes to town with them. Even with what seems to be everyone in the book trying to stop him, he stays one step ahead of friend and foe and carves a swathe of destruction through Moscow in the climax.

Overall, I do not recommend this book. Read it at your own discretion. Unlike the others, I can't call this a guilty pleasure because it left me guilty that I read it and I didn't enjoy reading it in the slightest. However, it does make me glad, when I compare this revolting mess to modern spy/geopolitical/military thrillers today. It shows how far the spy thriller genre has come as of 2015, how most authors have moved away from the badly executed and out of date tropes which riddle this book, and how said authors have become more creative at finding ways to thrill us and develop writing styles that wouldn't be more suited to a Saturday morning cartoon.

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