Book Review: The Hostage

W.E.B. Griffin is a prolific writer of military-themed novels. I borrowed The Hostage, book two in Griffin's Presidential Agent series of contemporary techo-thrillers, because I'd never read a story set in a post 9/11 world that followed the adventures of an operative for the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. The operative in this case is one Charley Castillo, an Army major and Green Beret of German and "Texican" background whom Griffin introduced to popular literature in By Order of the President.

Castillo proves to be taxing company. Sent to Argentina to find out what he can about the kidnapping of an American diplomat's wife and her husband's subsequent murder, Castillo soon learns that the woman's estranged brother is the person most responsible for the mayhem disrupting her family, because he's a midlevel United Nations bureacrat who knows a lot more than he should about the particulars of the Oil-for-Food scandal by which Saddam Hussein played Kofi Annan like a Stradivarius. Lethal people now looking for the wily man can't seem to find him.

Enter Castillo and his cronies, who promptly bury a promising plot under an endless succession of meetings with each other, meetings with their superiors, and meetings with informants. Although this aspect of the book is probably true to civil service culture, it doesn't do much for Castillo's bonafides as a man of action, and Castillo's credibility can't weather that kind of storm, because Griffin has already given his hero more money than the Count of Monte Cristo.

That a Green Beret would be fluent in three languages and certified as a helicopter pilot is believable, but that he would also have a Lear jet and a trust fund at his disposal suggests that Griffin enjoys paging through Batman and Justice League of America comic books in his off hours.

Interoffice romance between Castillo and a Philadelphia-cop turned-Secret-Service hottie named Betty Schneider never ascends to the believable, either. Schneider is never described. Worse, Major Castillo turns "wiener schnitzel" into a pet name for his lady love, and then repeats the phrase ad nauseum.

Griffin's prose style is perhaps best described as "Hemingway learned via correspondence school and drained of all color." Consider this airport scene as viewed on television by the man whom nearly everyone else in the book is looking for:

"The Air Commandos gave the hand salute.
Some other people got out of the trucks. Jean-Paul had no idea who they were. They went into the airplane. A minute or so later, four people, two men and two women, came back out. They were followed by eight or ten other people, some of them -- including two Marines-- in uniform. They all headed for the Yukons and got into them."

Got that? People go into and out of an airplane before boarding sport utility vehicles made by General Motors. But Griffin doesn't say how many people, what they look like, whether they walk purposefully or with resignation-- his cupboard hasn't a single dish in it.

Castillo only sounds believable when he's thinking like an operator, and it's in those moments that Griffith stops sleepwalking through the manuscript from one plot point to another long enough to make the story sing, as in this exchange on p. 433 between the American ambassador to Argentina and our stalwart hero:

"How are things going so far? Just generally, if details may be inappropriate."

"The first thing that can go wrong with this operation is that when I get to Jorge Newbury at five o'clock, a helicopter I borrowed won't be there. Or it will be there and the man in it will shoot me. Or if it's there and he doesn't shoot me, it will be equipped with a pressure-sensitive detonator and a couple of pounds of Semtex which will go bang when I pass through one thousand feet. Or if that doesn't happen, the engine will quit when I am equidistant over the Rio Plate between Jorge Newbury and Corrasco. Aside from that, everything's going swimmingly."

Silvio shook his head.

"That's today. The list of what can go wrong tomorrow is a little longer," Castillo said.

Good stuff, that. Sadly, the book doesn't have much of it. The Marine bodyguard whom everyone underestimates because he's small and looks like he's still in high school-- well of course he turns out to be a crack shot. As payoffs go, that was a gimme.

Techno-thrillers set the bar pretty low, but I'd rather immerse myself in a graphic novel than spend 465 pages hoping that cardboard characters will get out of manhunt meetings long enough to do something other than travel to other meetings in more exotic locations. Stalking? Surveillance? Angst? Confrontation? Like Ray Charles used to sing to y'all or somebody before a chorus, "help me out here, now."

I wanted to like this novel, and I did read all the way through to its anticlimactic finish, but The Hostage is not a book that I can recommend.