Devil's Gambit by Steve Abbott

by Steve Abbott

NEST - Nuclear Emergency Search Team. Specialists activated in the event of a nuclear incident.Three nuclear warheads complete with their delivery systems have been stolen from a Russian missile base. It's up to Captain Gayle Ecevit USAF and her joint Russian team to find and secure the missing devices, with the help of two members of the SAS. All the signs point towards North Korea but to what end? Were they taken to be reverse engineered to bolster their struggling weapons program or are they to be used for a darker purpose, to start the Korean War all over again. The answers might lie with a recent North Korean Defector sitting in a CIA safe house but maybe he's a plant, put forward by North Korean Intelligence to muddy the waters. MI6 has it's eyes on a shadowy South African arms dealer who specializes in smuggling nuclear materials. Gayle and her team must sift through all the possibilities and come to the right answer. A new Korean War hangs in the balance.

Paperback

First published December 11, 2014

About the author

Recently I came to a personal realization. I wasn’t having fun writing for film any more. I’d also bought myself a Kindle and well, you can guess the rest.

I’ve moved into self publishing. My first novel a nuclear thriller Devil’s Gambit was released in mid December of 2014. Currently I’m prepping it for release as a print on demand book through Amazon. My second book, Two Wheeled Maniac (Eight years and 75,000Km on a V-Strom) was released mid January. Both books are doing well with steady sales on the Kindle platform.

I’m currently working on my third book an adaptation of one of the first scripts I ever wrote and a story I’ve long wanted to bring to the world.

I’m still somewhat active in screenwriting, though these days I am more focused on building my career as an author.

Reviews

[Erma Odrach · Rating 5 out of 5]

North Korea wants all of Korea to be unified once again. Under Kim Jong Un, North Korea steals three nuclear warheads, originating from a Russian base in Georgia. Kim Jong Un and his army of a million men are set to take South Korea. Quite a bit of action ensues, with fights going on at sea and on land. The scenes are quite descriptive and realistic. In the book there is also considerable technical research, which only adds to its credibility. The brutality of Kim Jong Un's regime is seen vividly in the first few pages: "Growing shortages of goods and critical services took their toll ... A small uprising of farmers in the North just the month before had been halted with brutal expediency. Another blood-soaked example of what would happen if you tested the will of the party."

With USAF Captain Gayle Ecevit brought in to stop World War Three from happening, Devil's Gambit is an action-packed, riveting read.

[John · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is an interesting story, and very plausible in today's world. The story involves an arms dealer arranging for the acquisition and transportation of three nuclear warheads to North Korea. How the deal is detected and frantic activities that it puts into motion make for non-stop action and a high body count. There are a couple of questions--would you expect to find a newly promoted USAF captain, PhD not withstanding, to be the leader of a joint US/USSR NEST (Nuclear Emergency Search Team)? Is the Russian nuclear weapon security as bad as portrayed? Even though this is a good story, it would get more stars if the proof-reading had not been so lax. The problem is not misspelled words, but wrong words, missing words, or words that just don't belong, at least in the context where they are used. This reduces a 4 star story to 3.5 stars.