James Grady is a longtime author of thrillers, police procedural and espionage novels. He graduated from the University of Montana School of Journalism in 1974. During college, he worked for United States Senator Lee Metcalf of Montana as an staff member.
From 1974 - 1978 he was an investigative journalist for the famous muckraker Jack Anderson. Best known as the author of Six Days of the Condor, which was adapted to film as Three Days of the Condor starring Robert Redford in 1975.
James Grady has gone on to write almost a dozen more novels in the thirty-eight years since Six Days of the Condor was published.
In the past James Grady has written under the pseudonyms of James Dalton and Brit Shelby.
This is a seriously flawed book. If you liked Grady's earlier works, forget this one. Grady is at his best when he describes settings and the people in them. You can tell that he enjoys doing so, or at least did in his earlier works. In this work he evidently discovered the sentence fragment, the incomplete sentence, as a means of filling up pages perhaps to meet the requirements of a book advance from his publisher. Whatever the reason the result is page after page of fragments of thoughts and descriptions. Used effectively, and rarely, a sentence fragment can be an effective tool. Used over and over and over it is the mark of a poor or lazy writer. The sex scenes are also gratuitous and predictable. Another required element of the modern novel I suppose. But they add no depth to the characters or the plot. Stick to his early work. Or find another crime novel author; there are plenty.
This is a fairly by-the-numbers political thriller; a CIA agent's partner gets killed under mysterious circumstances and he starts an underground investigation to find out why. Unfortunately, it completely failed to draw me in; I gave up after reading 100 pages I just didn't find myself caring about any of the characters or anything that was happening to them. As a result, the intrigue parts of the book came across as dull. The action sequences are done with lots of sentence fragments, which came across as overwrought, like Grady was trying to imitate a fast-cut action movie style.
fast-paced, a little disjointed in places, yet pretty much all "comes together" in the wrap-up -- looking forward to reading Grady's 2nd book of spy/intrigue
Great story but hard to follow with so many characters. Also, seemed like a rushed ending. Not enough explanation as to why the bad guy was bad. Otherwise, would probably make a good movie like Six Days of The Condor.