Friday, May 25, 2012

The Call - by Steven Savile and Alex Black - Book 4 in the Viral novella series

3 of 5 Stars

This is the 4th and currently final novella in the Viral series.  Four stand-alone stories, all dealing, in different ways, with using the inoculations of children as covers for CIA operations.

In this story CIA case officer Nikolas Koteas is hunting down a notorious Taliban commander in Pakistan. When it becomes clear that his ruthless enemy has acquired a biological weapon of mass destruction, Koteas must ask himself how far he will go to complete his mission.  This is where the tie-in with the other three novellas comes in, as he tries to justify the inoculation of children in the compound so they won't be there when things go down.

Things are made even more complicated with the introduction of Bill O'Brian, a Special Agent Investigator from the Agency's Inspector General Office there to investigate our hero's alledged support of the Retired Intelligence Officers group which has been critical of some CIA tactics over the last decade.  By the way,  in one of the story's lighter moments, I really enjoyed the way Koteas manages to get O'Brian out of his hair.

Once again, the story was good, but I was very disappointed with the proofreading.  There were more than a few errors with repeated words and other things.  An example being "However useful talking to the him might be..."  there were enough of these for me to drop from 4 to 3 Stars.  I did enjoy the story, but could have done without the errors.

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