Fast suspenseful read. Almost as good as the original John Corey, Plum Island.

Detective John Corey is amazing and this book had me on the edge of my seat the whole time. Fantastic!!

I had a hard time getting into this book until John and Kate Corey came onto the scene…. Loved the rest of the book!

Obviously the wrong genre for me. This reminded me of Tom Clancy, but without the panache of early Clancy (before his books became formulaic). All I kept thinking was "this book suffers from testosterone poisoning." Suspend belief once you open the pages.

I love DeMille and Corey returns with his trademark silly wit, and gallows humor that will always keep me coming back for more. On these points the author doesn't disappoint. The topic is timely and the book is well paced, but this isn't my favorite DeMille plot.

Some of this seems a bit rote- agents "off the grid" again. The book centers around a bad-guy and his evil master plan I didn't really believe was credible. A worthy beach read I'll happily hand off now that its done.

Nelson DeMille is one of my top five authors. With Wild Fire, he didn't disappoint me again.

Detective John Corey and his FBI Agent-wife, Kate, were thrust into an investigation that started out as a not so simple murder investigation. It turned into a conspiracy investigation involving powerful men in government and business with potentially devastating impact on the planet.

While Corey's smart mouth and quick one liners keep the story interesting, the story line tended to be a bit linear, exposing the guilty party early in the book. It left me wondering how DeMille would keep it interesting. But in typical style, he did.

I recommend this book to anyone who appreciates a story that is filled with tension on a global scale and very much within the realm of reality. Pretty chilling material.

The last book I read from this author was The General's Daughter. This detective, policeman novel was full of macho talk and one-liners. Thankfully it got better after the first 50 pages.

Craptastic!

Compreendo a necessidade de uma pequena/média editora ter de fazer dinheiro.... mas as complicações que vieram da compra dos direitos de autor desta série que fez com que já tenham sido publicados livros posteriores é algo que faz muito pouco sentido. Este é o 4.º livro da série, acabadinho de sair, e já li o sexto e o sétimo. De resto, uma história bem imaginada, com humor irreverente à mistura, mas nada de especial.

I read a page of this book on someone else’s Kindle on a flight a few weeks ago and was intrigued enough by the premise that I bought and read it fairly quickly. Ultimately, that intriguing premise is all the book has to offer, unless you read a book for unfunny dialogue, a grating protagonist, and a cartoonish villain. (Notice I didn’t say a plot, of which there is little.)

The novel, published in 2006, is set in 2002, just after 9/11. The premise – and I’m not giving away much here – involves a secret government protocol called Wild Fire established in the 1980s to deal with the nascent threat of Islamic terrorism. If a weapon of mass destruction is used on American soil by Islamic terrorists, an automated response rains down nuclear weapons on the major cities and other key sites of the Muslim world, killing hundreds of millions. The governments of those states are aware of the protocol and have kept their terror groups in check as a result. Enter Bain Madox, American oil billionaire and Bond villain, played in my mind by Sam Elliott. Madox, angered by 9/11, wants to activate Wild Fire by detonating nuclear weapons on American soil. Certain elements in the federal government have assured him that the government tacitly approves and wouldn’t stop the automated response if it came to that.

I’m not giving much away here – Madox tells this entire story to Harry Muller, a federal agent he captures on his property in the first 30 pages. (Exposition makes for awesome reading.) Harry’s disappearance triggers an investigation by the protagonist John Corey (apparently this is his fourth appearance in DeMille’s books) and his wife Kate Mansfield. Mansfield is just perfect enough to be boring – a FBI agent and a lawyer, she’s sexy, smart, and level-headed. Corey, a former NYPD cop now working for the Anti-Terrorism Task Force, is none of those things except boring. A classic “I don’t play by the rules” tough guy, Corey is a caricature who tells awful jokes every time he opens his mouth and resists authority for no good reason. I don’t need characters to be likable for a book to be good, but Corey is actively grating.

Corey and Mansfield investigate Muller’s disappearance and face off with Madox more than you’d think would happen in a criminal investigation. I really get the feeling that DeMille loved these characters* and thought it was thrilling to have them talk face-to-face a la the aforementioned Bond and his evil counterparts. Unfortunately, he ends up forcing one-dimensional stereotypes into mostly boring conversations. The characters also make some silly choices, and there is ultimately almost no tension in the book’s 519 pages (200 without Corey’s awful jokes). The plot is virtually non-existent – a hard feat given that nuclear war is imminent.

*In the preface, DeMille says he believes Madox is the “best villain” DeMille ever created, and “certainly … the smartest and most interesting bad guy to come out of some scary place” in DeMille’s psyche. If true, don’t read anything by DeMille.

A lazy and ultimately boring effort. Not recommended.

This was a great read. I love all the John Corey series. Plenty of suspense, plenty of satire. Good locations and great characters. Love this author.

This is the third book I have read by this author and was disappointed again. This is another "save the world" type would be thriller and I have given the book 2 stars since I did actually finish the book. I would really give it 1 1/2 stars if I could. The story line goes beyond very highly implausible into the impossible realm. The author doesn't think his readers know that radio waves travel at the speed of light, or perhaps the author himself doesn't know it.
In addition the crude wise guy dialogue becomes extremely tedious.
The general outcome of the story becomes clear within 20 or so pages and the only reason to continue to the end is to learn the horrific fate awaiting the bad guys who our hero will kill. I am afraid that an excess of testosterone is what caused me to finish the story. With less of the hormone you would not want to touch this book.