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"Her AK-47 assault rifle held chest high, she pounded down a tunnel lined with rough rock walls. Her heart was thumping with fear. At last she found a gray metal door and yanked it open. Inside was a ladder. Glancing back over her shoulder, she climbed swiftly up the long, narrow shaft and, at the top, pulled herself out into a moonless night. Breathing hard, she stared at three men who were sitting around a campfire, talking in Russian...As gunfire faded in the distance, she crouched with the trio, her powerful Kalashnikov rifle cradled in her arms. She did not smile. There was no need. These men did not smile. They were hard and seasoned. She was one of them."
Within the select genre of espionage thrillers, the masters of the game are legendary names --- John Le Carre, Len Deighton, Robert Ludlum --- and for decades they've dominated one of the last remaining all-male clubs in fiction. With the release of her latest novel MESMERIZED, Gayle Lynds has firmly established herself as a strong female voice in this formerly male-dominated world.
MESMERIZED explodes into action in the first few pages with the near death of a rising star in the Washington legal profession, Beth Convey, who is given back her life with an emergency heart transplant. To her dismay, she's the recipient of more than just a second chance at life when her new heart becomes a source of frightening dreams and inexplicable behaviors. Pursuing the discovery that her donor was a former KGB agent that took asylum in the United States, she stumbles into the cross hairs of another ex-KGB general plotting a terrorist attack to restore Russia to it's former Cold War status. The broad scope of his maniacal plan and the depth of infiltration reaches into the highest levels of both American and Russian political and financial institutions.
Simultaneously, Jeff Hammond, a reporter for the Washington Post, has been coming closer to uncovering the true activities of General Alexei Berianov and his compatriots --- a belief he's followed doggedly for the past 10 years --- and inevitably he finds his own investigation entangled with that of Beth Convey. Terminated from the ranks of the FBI years ago, Hammond finds himself under suspicion as a mole by the very people he once considered his friends and cohorts. As the evidence piles up against him, and the overlapping circles of undercover operations begin to erupt in a series of murders, Beth finds herself trapped in the dangerous complexities of international espionage. With both of their lives in jeopardy from Russian and American conspirators, Beth and Jeff form an uneasy alliance while trying to sort out just who they can trust.
An interesting twist to the usual espionage suspense is the intriguing true life medical theory that Lynds introduces through her character Beth Convey. Following the heart transplant, Beth finds she's experiencing what appear to be memories and emotions transferred to her psyche from her unwitting KGB donor, which engage her in a struggle for control of her thoughts and actions. Detailed descriptions of the theoretical capabilities of the human heart to embody characteristics that were once believed to be the sole domain of the brain are fluidly integrated with the other elements of the plot. Lynds follows up on this very real phenomena in her Author's Notes at the end of the book, with references to publications that can offer readers even more insight. Whether or not readers accept the premise as having substance in reality, there's no question that it provides a fascinating substory.
Gayle Lynds's diverse credentials and uncanny sense of the undercurrents in the counterintelligence community lend a heightened reality to a storyline that already paralleled recent events at it's publication. Americans content to believe the Cold War has become ancient history will find her fictional account of the rumors that persist regarding the KGB and the FBI a chilling reminder that the average citizen rarely knows what's currently transpiring in the shadowy recesses of our government agencies. MESMERIZED is definitely this summer's hottest espionage thriller, one that's going to result in a couple of long, suspense-filled nights for Lynds's readers.
--- Reviewed by Ann Bruns
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