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### Amazon.com Review

In his third outing (following ** and **), Nick Stone, Andy McNab's series SAS agent, is off the Firm's regular payroll owing to a major screwup in his last assignment that left his best friend's family slaughtered--except for the one child who survived. Little Kelly needs expensive treatment for the post-traumatic stress that's turned her nearly catatonic, so Nick takes on a freelance assignment that gets him mixed up with Russian organized crime--in particular, with an enigmatic mob boss who has designs on some Finnish cybertechnology. When Nick realizes it's not industrial espionage that he's involved with but military secrets, he's caught between warring factions of the Russian Mafia and the Anglo-American alliance of intelligence agencies. The Westerners will do anything to keep the Echelon program out of the hands of Valentin Lebed--the Chechnyan Mafioso who makes Nick an offer he can't refuse--and the Maliskia, a gang of rival Russian criminals who want to derail Lebed's plans and take over Echelon themselves.

The action ranges from Helsinki to St. Petersburg to London, the weaponry is fully detailed, and the techniques of infiltration and retrieval carefully outlined; McNab, a former SAS commando who, according to the author's note "is still wanted by a number of terrorist organizations and is therefore forbidden to reveal his face or current location," obviously remembers every ache, pain, bruise, and injury he suffered in his life of derring-do, since they're all completely and graphically described here, too. *--Jane Adams*

### From Publishers Weekly

This is McNab's third Nick Stone novel, and when you factor in all the times that Stone is stalked, betrayed, mugged, drugged, beaten, frozen to within an inch of his life and nearly blown to bits, it's a wonder the stoic British ex-SAS (special forces) operative is still alive. In many ways, Stone is the perfect thriller hero: someone strong enough to absorb punishment, smart enough to game plan the details of the job and just enough of a line soldier not to ask too many questions about his assignment. Just to make sure, McNab (himself a former SAS agent) gives Stone the perfect reason not to be inquisitive: his ward, Kelly, is catatonic with post-traumatic stress disorder, and since her treatment is wildly expensive, Stone finds himself in the middle of a totally unprofessional kidnapping of Russian mafia kingpin Valentin Lebed in Helsinki. When it all goes violently wrong, Stone lets Lebed go for a price, and leaps at the chance to earn even more money when Lebed's attractive assistant, Liv, gives him another assignment: break into a Finnish safe house for a little software theft. It will come as no surprise that the theft puts Stone in the gunsights of the NSA and the Russian mob. Most of the novel is a record of Stone bouncing between a rock and a hard place, trying to complete his mission, avoid capture and stay alive, with McNab's real-life adventures the source for Stone's. In this genre, all plans are made to fail, except perhaps McNab's plan to take the thriller world by storm. (July)Forecast: Because of his work for SAS, McNab cannot appear in public, so author tours are a no-go, but extensive advertising and promotion plans back up this solid thriller and will increase sales.

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