No Way Back - Hardcover

Crow, Michael

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0060725834 ISBN 13: 9780060725839

Publisher: Harper, 2005

Synopsis

Discuss. It takes only one word before Luther Ewing's mandatory six-month vacation from a Baltimore narc squad leaves him holed up in a D.C. spook house, prepping for a CIA mission. Nadya, a Russki vixen,is there to help him brush up on his Russian, while Eunkyong, a knock-out Korean-American is there to train him in Tae Kwon Do and give him Koreanlessons -- just enough to get by where he's going. He's got a new wardrobe full of tailored business suits and chinos, a new arsenal, even a new name -- Terrence Prentice -- and a simple job description: Protect the package. The rest of the details are a bit sketchy: Guard Mr. Kim, a South Korean businessman known to be doing a little trading with the rogue North. GetKim into Vladivostok to seal a shady CIA-sponsored deal with two corrupt Russian generals, and then get him back out alive. Easy, no bang bang, just quick thinking and some smooth talk. But the devil is in the details -- and what Luther doesn't know might just get him killed.

Relentless prose and unforgettable characters punctuate the page-turning action, as Michael Crow once again delivers a novel that not only explores violence, greed, and betrayal but also plumbs the depths of the human heart.

About this title

About the Author

Michael Crow is a pseudonym. As a journalist he was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize in investigative reporting for a series on the New York Mafia. He has written two previous Luther Ewing novels -- Red Rain and The Bite -- and divides his time between New York City; Woodstock, New York; and Europe.

Reviews

Baltimore cop Luther Ewing, having just received a six-month suspension from his narc squad job, takes on a CIA mission to fill the down time. An ex–Special Forces spook with a long history of mass mayhem, Luther's now headed for a dicey bodyguarding scenario in Korea and Vladivostok. He suffers from a head wound that forces him to take medication four times a day, but the injury hasn't dulled his impressive skills. He's a master of any number of weapons systems, but the book, the third in a series (Red Rain; The Bite), focuses mostly on the setup and training for the mission. His controllers are two beauties, Nadya and Allison, and an old partner from his Bosnian days, Westley. Their job is to protect a wealthy South Korean making a mysterious deal with a pair of devious Russian generals. As always in these sorts of adventures, double-crosses, triple-crosses and more are expected and supplied. The real fun is in trying to figure out who's in charge, what the real game is and how to tell the good guys from the bad. Luther performs with his usual deadly grace, and Crow lays it all out with style and strength. The action takes a while to arrive, but once there it's swift, brutal and rewarding.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Luther Ewing's ethnicity--half Vietnamese, half black--isolates him. Groups won't accept him until he proves himself, as he did in the Gulf War and recently as an undercover narc for the Baltimore PD. Scapegoated in a politically sensitive case gone sour, Ewing is suspended without pay for six months. Out of the shadows walks his former CIA handler with a short-term job: bodyguard a South Korean businessman through a complex money-for-information deal with a cadre of disaffected Russian military officers. After training in Washington, Luther is on the job, and--as readers of espionage fiction expect--nothing is as expected, all relationships are suspect, and few of the players will survive. The previous two entries in the Ewing series--The Bite (2003) and Red Rain (2002)--are violent, intelligent cop thrillers. Crow's foray into Ludlumesque territory, though, is a definite misstep. The training section is far too long, and the plot is confusing rather than intricate. A disappointing entry in what remains, nevertheless, a promising series. Wes Lukowsky
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Edition details

• Publisher: Harper
• Publication date: 2005
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0060725834
• ISBN 13: 9780060725839
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 304