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Stephen Coonts has for several years been busily shouldering his way to the front of the pack of military thriller writers. Seemingly incapable of writing badly, he demonstrates a familiar acquaintance with the geewhiz technological side of the genre while choosing to focus primarily on the personalities between the machinery. Coonts has been most successful with his novels that feature Admiral Jake Grafton. Many of Coonts's longtime readers, however, have clamored for a book featuring Tommy Carmellini, the burglar turned CIA operative who has been one of Coonts's more interesting creations. The readers get their wish --- and then some --- with LIARS & THIEVES.
LIARS & THIEVES is played out against a backdrop that combines the vestiges of the Cold War with a contemporary political convention. Carmellini is assigned to a tour of guard duty at a CIA safe house where U.S. government operatives are debriefing a KGB archivist who has defected to the United States and who has had access to --- and copies of --- records of every intelligence operation that the KGB ever ran. When Carmellini arrives on-site, however, he stumbles into a commando attack --- undertaken by American operatives --- that appears to have left everyone dead, save for an attractive American translator. Carmellini escapes with her, but soon finds that the translator has an agenda all her own.
One other person, however, has also escaped the safe house carnage: it is the archivist, who is suffering from traumatic amnesia. Carmellini suddenly finds himself blamed for the carnage and is potentially in the scope of virtually every law enforcement officer in the country. He must rely on his wits, street smarts and contacts on both sides of the law to determine what was behind the attack on the safe house and to escape intact from the mysterious forces that are pursuing him.
Carmellini turns to his mentor and friend, Jake Grafton, for help. Carmellini and Grafton gradually come to learn that the archivist has information regarding a KGB operation that involved the use of an individual who is now in the highest levels of the United States government, an individual with the power, and the desire, to stop the information of his traitorous activities from ever being revealed. The pursuit of Carmellini and the archivist leads from West Virginia through the mean backstreets of Washington, D.C., all the way to a political convention held in New York City where Carmellini plays a dangerous game that involves discovering the identity of his pursuer while trying desperately to stay alive.
LIARS & THIEVES has little of the military derring-do of Coonts's previous works; readers who have not previously treated themselves to a Coonts thriller should definitely pick up this one, which is closer to James Bond than Jack Ryan in spirit. Coonts continues his practice of using "real world" situations as a basis for his plots, using The Venona Papers and the political aspirations of presidential spouses as plot devices, and it's great fun to figure out who is who in Coonts's fictitious world. If Coonts is intending to pass the torch from Grafton to Carmellini, LIARS & THIEVES bodes extremely well for Coonts's future projects.
--- Reviewed by Joe Hartlaub
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