Secrets of State

Rating:
Summary: A thoroughly enjoyable read
Review: Damien Hunter's Secrets of State was totally engrossing. The main characters, Leighton and Paula, were not just secret agents, but real people I could identify with and empathize with. Very seldom are the moral conflicts inherent in being an assassin or spy developed in the way Hunter has done. He makes these characters REAL people you can care about. The descriptions of the threats Leighton faces as he tries to decide who he can trust with his and Paula's lives are gripping. The author has done an excellent job along the lines of LeCarre in making an interesting and believable story. If you enjoy a good, complex spy novel with multiple twists and turns and a non-formula story line, I'd recommend you pick up a copy of Secrets of State for your summer reading list.

Rating:
Summary: In the Company of LeCarre, Deighton, and Fleming
Review: I have been an avid reader of spy novels for the past 25 years and am a lover of "the classics," from Eric Ambler to Len Deighton to John LeCarre to Ian Fleming. I feel well qualified to proclaim that Damien Hunter's Secrets of State is easily one of the best spy novels that I have ever read. Period.

That seems like an incredible compliment to level on any book, but I've read a lot of them and this one belongs in the company of The Spy Who Came in from the Cold or The Ipcress File or From Russia with Love. It is an instant classic.

Forboding, at times dark, at other times erotic and sometimes melancholy, and at all times evocative and chillingly suspenseful, this is a must read. It is the kind of book that when you are finished reading, you begin looking over your shoulder, afraid that someone has seen you reading it and now knows that you know!, and feeling all of the paranoia of its central character. What an incredible find!

There are so many moments in this book where the author succeeds in not only writing a gripping and suspenseful tale but also in taking you so far beyond the spy genre with the moral and ethical concerns of a spy and hired killer.

Damien Hunter's hero, Jeigh Leighton, is a conflicted, tortured soul, who in one transcendant scene is seeking asylum and is locked in the nearly airtight crypt of a Catholic church with a former lover and fellow agent while Costa Rican security forces stand ready to burst down the doors. Here and in so many other places Leighton confronts his demons and is shown at
the crossroads of good and evil as he serves a corrupt master...his government.

There are no cookie cutter characters here, no stock villains, no tired cliches, no forgettable standard locales. All the characters in this book are ambivalent and straddle both light and darkness, metaphors that run throughout the book. Every chapter is a gateway into a new world.

What Damien Hunter has accomplished is writing about real people with real motives. The relationship between Leighton and Paula Grant, for example, has no precedent in spy lore. There's never been a real relationship between a man and a woman in the spy genre...in fact you have to wait until you read Mr. Hunter's book to find a male author who can write women without
being patronizing or seeking to project his own sexual fantasies. Paula Grant is compelling and three-dimensional and this reader at least hopes Mr. Hunter will consider a special novel just for her.

An incredibly thoughtful and intelligent work that is so much more than a mere genre book and may have to be classified with such works of literature as Dostoyevsky's The Devils or Joseph Conrad's Secret Agent of Heart of Darkness. Secrets of State deftly bridges a gap between such classic works of literature and the very best of the spy genre. It also has the
timelessness of these works and while it focuses on the American involvement in Central America of a previous decade, it seems somehow prescient and forewarning of a time to come.

What also grabs you about Hunter's book is the level of detail and the way he is able to bring the reader directly into an experience. The book's events read as though actually experienced by the author, and you get the sense that he has experience with everything he describes, including sophisticated weapons, parachuting, hand-to-hand military combat, basic survival techniques, scuba diving, skiiing, and perhaps has even been privy to some classified information on black ops. I think he also captures the way that intelligence and law enforcement agencies often work at cross-purposes, and so much of this is right on time as the 9-11 hearings unfold. Most books read as though researched in a library. I think this author has visited every single place that he writes about and driven on every dirt backwoods trail and had a drink in very bar and prayed to every saint in every church.

But perhaps one of the greatest accomplishments of this book is that its complex central character is an African-American, and this brilliantly enhances the ambiguities of this novel. Leighton is a man from a family of black soldiers driven so absolutely by some black middle class need to succeed in a white world that he will involve himself in even the most impossible of missions. If this isn't a powerful metaphor for the attempts of African-Americans to belong to a society that consistently scorns them, nothing, not even the images of countless Black soldiers fighting and dying for this country from the Revolutionary War to the Iraq, will suffice.

This doesn't mean that comparisons to Walter Mosely are in order, for Hunter exceeds even Mosely's revitalization of the crime genre. Leighton is heir to the Buffalo Soldier, complicit in much of what he seeks to combat, who must, must continue to serve a corrupt master because that corrupt master sets the limits by which Leighton can call himself a man.

A brilliant book and I understand a first novel by this author. I for one am ready for the next Jeigh Leighton novel. Bravo! Mr. Hunter, and to paraphrase Nick Fury, Agent of Shield, Hey, keep 'em comin'.

Rating:
Summary: A Hard Hitting Thriller Pointing to American Motives in Iraq
Review: Secrets of State is a hard-hitting thriller that gives it to you right between the eyes, no window-dressing and no apologies. If newcomer Damien Hunter isn't a spook, he's sure done his homework, the book is that realistic. His main character Leighton is an assassin, a government agent trained in espionage who has somehow fallen into being used as a triggerman, and for once, Leighton disagrees with the reason he's been sent to kill a man. The violence is graphic, but never pointless.

Leighton's target is industrialist John Cortland, a Texas oil man, but a gunrunner and drug smuggler, too. Leighton is told he's doing it for national security, but in reality he's a pawn in a rogue operation and becomes the very next target in the crosshairs. What they don't tell him is that Cortland has a secret project, the one that's eating up the Texan's fortune, the one that threatens a global petrochemical empire. Leighton soon suspects the order to eliminate Cortland had nothing to do with gunrunning and drugs, and everything to do with the power of the oil industry.

Corporate power run amuck and hidden forces in the shadows are consistent themes in this thriller by first-time author Damien Hunter. Intelligence agencies and law enforcement work at cross-purposes in hunting Leighton down once his escape plan fails, while back home industrial sabotage undermines Cortland's project, and factions within Leighton's own agency are at odds as to whether to save or kill him, sending a team of hit men and an old flame to smoke him out. Secrets of State has a convoluted but fascinating plot, boiling down to a real page-turner. Set in Central America in the late 1980's, with the key event an assassination intended to preserve the power of an empire, it's a great read, and led me to speculate about our country's real motives in Iraq and the Middle East today.