THREE-EDGED SWORD. By Jeff Lindsay. Dutton. 384 pages. $27.49.
After the Chilly Conflict, former Soviet spy Ivo Balodis constructed himself a fortress in an deserted missile website on an island within the Baltic Sea. There, he has continued to deal in secrets and techniques — however for revenue as an alternative of for nation.
Balodis is now in possession of America’s most important protection secret and is accepting bids on it, anticipating to internet $2 billion {dollars}.
Chase Prescott, an insufferably haughty CIA agent, is determined to retrieve it. However how? The key is on a flash drive saved in a state-of-the-art vault. The vault lies on the backside of a missile silo on Balodis’s Island. And the island is fortified and guarded by a workforce of former Russian particular forces troops.
So Prescott turns to Riley Wolfe, self-proclaimed world’s biggest thief — a person motivated much less by revenue than by the joys of doing the not possible. As readers of Jeff Lindsay’s first two books on this sequence know, Wolfe is a chameleon who can alter his look, a parkour grasp capable of scale the perimeters of buildings, and he has confirmed he can steal something, regardless of how nicely guarded.
As “Double Edged Sword” opens, Prescott abducts Wolfe and presents him with a proposition. If Wolfe can retrieve the flash drive, Prescott will prepare immunity for his previous crimes. If he doesn’t, the agent will kill each Wolfe’s ailing mom and his greatest buddy, an artwork forger named Monique.
Nonetheless, Prescott additionally gives Wolfe a further enticement. If he succeeds, he can preserve anything of worth in Balodis’s vault, together with priceless Russian Orthodox icons the previous spy has collected.
Wolfe agrees, despite the fact that he has little doubt that Prescott may have him killed as quickly as he delivers.
Wolfe isn’t the primary anti-hero Lindsay has created. He’s additionally the writer of eight thrillers that includes Dexter Morgan, a serial killer who murdered solely different serial killers. These novels supplied the inspiration for “Dexter,” a preferred Showtime TV sequence.
As common with a Lindsay thriller, the darkly humorous story is tightly written. For probably the most half, the ingenious plot unfolds on the livid tempo the writer’s followers have come to anticipate. Often, nevertheless, it slows in poignant sections about Monique. The younger girl is simply awakening from a coma, the results of an assault on her in a earlier Wolfe novel, and Lindsay does a fantastic job of portraying her battle as she tries to recollect who she is.
