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UNACO

by Alastair MacNeill, Alistair MacLean, Peter Parkov (Translator)

When renegade members of Italy's notorious Red Brigades steal vials of a terrifying new super-virus, U.N. agents and a Red Brigades commander must cooperate to prevent the terrorists from killing millions.

Genres: Thriller, Fiction, Adventure, Indonesian Literature, Crime, Espionage, Action

341 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1991

About the author

Alastair MacNeill was born in Greenock, Scotland in 1960. His family emigrated to South Africa when he was six, settling in the coastal city of East London.

He returned to the United Kingdom in 1985 hoping to pursue a career as a writer. He submitted a manuscript to HarperCollins Publishers and, on the strength of it, was offered the chance to write a novel based on an outline by the late Alistair MacLean. He eventually wrote seven novels based on MacLean synopses and has also written five novels under his own name.

He lives in Sheffield.

Reviews

[Alger Smythe-Hopkins · Rating 3 out of 5]

Absolutely what you would expect of a formula genre novel written by a hack author in 1990 cribbing from the project proposals of a deceased writer whose own career peaked in the late 1950s.

Alistair MacLean was not a great writer, he was by his own admission, not even a writer but instead a story teller. His books are best understood as precursors to the Dan Brown school of all-action/no-plot novels. MacLean's one virtue was productivity, which upon his death meant that there were simply piles of project proposals he was pitching to disinterested producers who were disenchanted with him as his later work tended to be incoherent. Ah, but death changes everything, and his estate saw a chance to cash in.

This is where things get a little weird.
This Alastair MacNeill fellow just sort of appears in 1989 and starts churning out completed treatments of MacLean's proposals like clockwork despite having no prior writing experience, and then just kind of vanishes back to South Africa after a mediocre series of book under his own name fails to take hold. Between the rather remarkable similarity of names and the improbable author bio, it's pretty clear that the MacNeill alias was an invention masking a stable of jobbers.
I love this kind of stuff. The best part is that the agent for Alastair MacNeill continues to insist that "Uh-huh, he's a real boy" long after the name recognition and market value of the name have long expired.

So this leaves us with a synopsis of UN sponsored special forces, and a corporate author trying to flesh it out into something sensible and acceptably novel length. Let's just admit that this is not a great start. I quickly grasped the commitment of the author(s) to the project when I encountered this section on page 17:

UNACO employed 209 personnel, thirty of those being field operatives who had been siphoned off from law enforcement agencies around the world. They worked in teams of three, each team being denoted by the prefix "Strike Force," and their intensive training included all forms of unarmed combat and the use of all known firearms.... The training took place regularly at UNACO's Test Centre off the Interborough Highway in Queens. The entire complex was housed underground to ensure maximum security.

Aside from the strange choice of location for a top secret training facility for a top secret undercover global anti-terrorist special forces unit, there is the laughable claim that all of the agents in every strike force knew all the stuff. What is especially rich is that none of these skills are ever put into play during the novel, Strike Force Three brawls like drunks at a bar and show no particular ability with firearms. This is just boilerplate to take away objections if ever they do something that requires that they know the ancient art of Tibetian Finger Wrestling or be able to counter it in an opponent.
Also, laughably, the Big Bad in this novel are the Red Brigades, who essentially stopped existing about fifteen minutes after MacLean wrote up this premise, and in expanding it to a novel the MacClone couldn't be bothered to come up with a new terrorist group or location. Also unnerving is that this novel was published just as the USSR was falling apart, so this may be the last real-time novel that has the strange USA-USSR frenemy dynamic of the best Cold War novels. This one even ends with the Soviet representative looking forward to a quiet and happy retirement in Gorbachev's Russia.
So this is a period piece, and a hack job, but it is one that does its very best to be readable and to take itself seriously no matter how silly the situation. This puts it in the same class as the Bond Movies of this time, which were also floundering to find relevance in that same era of post-Glasnost hope. So it's good for what it is, but it's really not very much more than a series of inconsequential gunfights capped with a sudden, but entirely predictable betrayal.

[David · Rating 1 out of 5]

I have in the past been a bit better than a tepid fan of Alistair MacLean's books so when I saw this one with his misleading name on it I thought I'd give it a try, having not read it before. Made it to page 97 (of 390 in this printing) before giving up. While it seemed to have all the correct formulaic elements - unbelievably superior super counter intelligence types, clear villains, an interfering side story, a clear objective, high (albeit outdated) technology, an understated love entanglement, and a moralistic substructure - something was sadly missing here. It just did not have the pop, the zing, or the smoothness of how I remember 'MacLean's' books being. Just didn't come up to par. The lesson repeated here is that stand-in authors rarely if ever write at the same level as the author's they happen to be standing in for. I suppose publishers way too often give into this unscrupulous practice in a misguided attempt to make money off of someone else's name?

[Dark-Draco · Rating 1 out of 5]

I love a good plague story ... and the threat of terrorists releasing some nasty disease while a group of heroes battles to stop them, never really gets old. But somehow, I couldn't get into this. It was never actually explained who these terrorists were ... and as such I felt like I'd missed something. It might have been published in 1991, but it felt very much a product of an earlier time ... you only have to read the chapters introducing our three heroes and comparing how female Sabrina was described with males Mike and CW! It felt very bitty, with loads of characters being introduced and the story moving along at a glacial place. Decided to give up reading after a few chapters.

[Daniel Williams · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really need a 0.5, as in 3.5. I read this originally when it first came out around 1990. My feelings then are about the same as now. It was exciting. But had angles that were unnecessary, like the CW angle as the driver, and the last two chapters on the revenge. It did have the hallmarks of a MacLean outline otherwise, with the plot twists, betrayal, and unexpected motivation. The characters are more complex and full than in a typical MacLean book, which is nice, and why I tend to above average.

[Brent Winslow · Rating 4 out of 5]

A lethal virus that could kill millions has been violently stolen from a lab in Western Europe, and a terrorist organization in Italy will use it to gain power and promote terrorism worldwide. The UNACO team must infiltrate the Red Brigades while evading a marauding group of assassins intent on avenging the murdered scientists.

[Ronald · Rating 3 out of 5]

The Red Brigades help to use a lethal vial on an unsuspecting public in exchange for a political figure to stand down & money. The vial needs to be found but then there is a bomb threat at the same location. UNASCO has been called in. This novel was based on an idea by Alistair MacLean.

[M · Rating 3 out of 5]

Guy can't even spell his own name!

But I can't wait to read it.

[Assim · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5/5