Larry Bond's First Team

From Publishers Weekly
The troops of the small Special Ops force in this latest novel by Bond (Red Phoenix, etc.) spend about equal time bantering with each other and blowing up stuff: buildings, vehicles and even thugs who stand in their way. Aside from its inherent entertainment value (which is considerable), this is a good formula because it allows Bond and coauthor DeFelice to smoothly fold in an enormous amount of exposition and to introduce, over the course of a hundred or so short chapters, the individual members of Joint Services Special Demands Project Office, known to insiders as simply the Team, for the novel is the kickoff of a projected series about the new war on terror. Smooth, shrewd Bob Ferguson leads them, engineering their escape from a tricky trap in Kyrgyzstan early on. The MacGuffin: a planned meeting with Russian wheeler dealer Alex Sheremetev in Kyrgyzstan goes awry when Ferg finds Sheremetev's murdered corpse. Before you can say frameup, local police have arrested Team member Jack "Guns" Young (a Marine and language expert) for the crime. It's up to Ferg, Connors (the old man and explosives expert) and Rankin (the young hothead) to rescue Guns and find the real killer-and that's just for starters. Back in Washington, Corrine Alston, chief adviser to the new president, disdains the maverick modus operandi of the Team and Ferg in particular, so much so that she flies to Russia to confront and control him. Her slow journey from skeptic to supporter is the novel's most entertaining and mainstream plot thread, the reader on her shoulder as she's immersed in the rough and tumble adventures of the Team. This is a solid series debut. Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.


From Booklist
Bond, the author of a string of best-selling techno-thrillers, has achieved the sort of status that lets a writer stick his own name right in the title of his book. This is the first installment of a series of novels spotlighting twenty-first-century warfare: wars fought not by armies, but by small groups of highly trained experts, in other words, by intelligence not firepower. At the center of this novel is the First Team, a small unit created by the CIA to "address unconventional threats in an unconventional way" and currently operating undercover in the former Soviet Union, tracking radioactive waste that could, in the hands of a particularly clever terrorist, be used to wreak havoc on an unsuspecting world. The team is an entirely fictional creation, but Bond and cowriter DeFelice (who's also collaborated with Stephen Coonts and Dale Brown) combine research and imagination to make the whole premise seem completely plausible. The team itself--a CIA officer, a marine, and two Special Forces commandos--is a lively quartet of characters, trading witticisms and good-natured insults as they try to save the world from an evil villain. In fact, Bond may finally have learned how to create characters who feel like people, not stick figures or functions of an overly complicated plot. Fans of his muscular techno-thrillers will thoroughly enjoy this new novel, and clamor for more First Team adventures. Readers who've tried a Bond novel, and failed to find much to enjoy, ought to give this one a try; they'll be pleasantly surprised. David Pitt
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved


Stephen Coonts
Technothriller fans rejoice! Larry Bond is good--very, very good.


Review
The technothriller has a new ace and his name is Larry Bond.


Book Description
The New York Times bestselling author of the classic technothrillers Red Phoenix and Day of Wrath, Larry Bond has won praise for the gritty authenticity of his military-political adventures as well as for his matchless talent at generating edge-of-your-seat suspense. Now Bond debutes an exciting new series that rockets straight from the cutting edge of America's war on terror . . .

Officially designated the Joint Services Special Demands Project, "The Team" is a unique unit created to address unconventional threats in an unconventional manner, beyond the beurocratic restraints of either the U.S. intelligence or military establishments. With an almost unlimited budget, the Team, consisting of a CIA officer, two Special Forces commandos, and one outnumbered Marine--is authorized to track vital intel and then take immediate action.

A radical response to perilous times, the Team has never been more needed than this very moment: a quantity of radioactive waste, being shipped across the former Soviet Union, has gone missing. In the wrong hands, the stolen material can be converted into a "dirty bomb" capable of rendering any American city uninhabitable for centuries. With time running out, the Team must locate and neutralize the threat--unaware that their unseen enemy has already chosen a target: the island paradise of Honolulu.




About the Author
Larry Bond is the author of numerous bestselling thrillers, including Vortex, Cauldron, and The Enemy Within. A former Naval Intelligence officer, warfare analyst and anti-submarine technology expert, he makes his home in Springfield, Virginia.

Jim DeFelice has previously collaborated with Stephen Coonts and Dale Brown. He lives in New York State.



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A mythically capable CIA operative leads a team of intrepid, off-the-books warriors in a battle to defuse a terrorist dead-set on the destruction of Honolulu. Bond's (The Enemy Within, 1996) army of readers, who expect the full armory of barely even invented, occasionally imaginary gadgets to be deployed at a breakneck pace, will be thoroughly satisfied with this first-in-a-series collaboration with the useful Jim DeFelice, who has helped out fellow technowarriors Stephen Coontz and Dale Brown. The threat to everything we hold dear is seldom-seen Samman Bin Saqr, a terrorist who makes bin Laden look like a piker. Bin Saqr has laid low for five years, all the while accumulating atomic waste from dirty corners of the old Soviet empire. His plan is to irradiate Honolulu and its hinterland so thoroughly that it will be uninhabitable for eons and the great Satan will be more humbled than ever. Fortunately for the great Satan, there is Bob Ferguson, a CIA operative who, even though he's walking around with thyroid cancer, is capable of navigating the treacherous slopes and deserts of the Stans, firing any number of weapons from the hip, outfoxing Russian intelligence officers, sending scores of scurvy Chechnyans to their makers, and ordering off the menu in any number of obscure southwest Asian languages. Ferguson's been on the case of the missing nuclear waste for some time, a hunt that keeps putting him in Chechnyan rebel territory, but he's always got a way out of the jams he and "The Team," his band of army and marine merrymakers, crash into. He may have met his match, however, in brilliant, 26-year-old presidential counselor Corinne Atkins, his new boss. Corinne has been ordered to take aclose look at both The Team and The Threat, orders that jet her to the Chechnyan front, where Ferguson, who has no use for her, has followed Bin Saqr's scent nearly to the abandoned Soviet air base where the poisonous 747 is ready to fly. Action on every page. Maybe in every paragraph. $200,000 ad/promo; author tour. Agent: Robert Gottlieb/Trident Media Group


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