A Passing Advantage

by Mark McGarrity

General Mike Mackey is a superbly trained solder. He is too well trained to let "a passing advantage" slip by. While the commander of the Soviet forces watches complacently from the east bank of the Elbe, Mackey seizes a momentary opportunity to turn the superior strength of the Russians against themselves.

The avalanche of events triggered by his decision reverberates in Washington, Bonn, and Moscow in this all-too-accurate forecast of what could happen, next year...next month...next week!

Genres: Mystery

277 pages, Paperback

First published March 1, 1980

About the author

aka Bartholomew Gill.

Mr. McGarrity was born in Holyoke, Mass., and graduated from Brown University in 1966. He studied for his master's degree at Trinity College, Dublin, and never tired of mining the country for material.

''One of the things they gave me,'' he once said of his books, ''is a chance to go back to Ireland time and time again to do research.''

He was also an avid outdoorsman, and since 1996 worked at The Star-Ledger of Newark as a features writer and columnist under the McGarrity name, specializing in nature and outdoor recreation. While continuing to produce McGarr novels, sometimes at the rate of one a year, Mr. McGarrity produced several articles a week for the newspaper. He wrote about a variety of topics ranging from environmental issues to the odd characters he encountered in his travels, like an Eastern European immigrant who grew up watching cowboy movies and found his dream job playing Wyatt Earp in an amusement park in rural New Jersey.

Reviews

[Henri Moreaux · Rating 3 out of 5]

A Passing Advantage by Mark McGarrity is classic 80s airport fiction; simple characters yet captivating action which draws you in from the get-go and a pace that gives you a good chance of reading a fair slog of it whilst you wait for your flight to arrive/land/not be delayed indefinitely.

Based around the cold war fears of the 1980s this novel deals with military exercises in West Germany that escalate into a geographically limited war with Russia.

It's interesting, keeps your attention and doesn't suffer from any massive plot holes but like all paperback military action novels it's light on substance and has limited character building.

[Nicholas George · Rating 2 out of 5]

While the premise of the book is intriguing--what would a military doomsday scenario look like circa 1980?--most of it plays out like standard men's adventure war-porn, with lots of battlefield logistics and tactical maneuvering that quickly grow old. The characters (Americans, Russians and Germans) are all one-dimensional, and there are too many to keep track of. This book was probably intended as some of cautionary tale but, if so, it glorifies war and conflict too much to achieve that goal.

[Jan jr. Vaněk · Rating 2 out of 5]

Remarkably, though not memorably, idiotic.