Synopsis
Harry Lightstone, the leader of a crew of forest cops on the prowl for illegal hunters, takes on an international junta of financiers, industrialists, and paid assassins
Reviews
The prose gallops like a runaway moose through Goddard's ( Balefire ) environmental adventure yarn as an international cabal of Very Big Businesses sends a mega-lethal hit squad, code name ICER, to destroy the pro-green activist groups whose demands are jeopardizing their profits. A covert team of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service recruits rogue undercover cop Henry Lightstone to flush out the Chareaux brothers, two cold-blooded Cajuns who are running wild game hunts in national parks. Lightstone's smooth sting operation hits a speed bump when two ICER directors horn in on his private hunt. After making the bust, the Wildlife team watches as ICER uses its Interior Department clout to get the charges dropped. Dismantled and scattered across the country, Lightstone's team is targeted by an ICER terminator squad. Henry fakes out the FBI and reunites the surviving team members to cross paths with the Chareauxs. They escape with enough forensic evidence to lead them to ICER headquarters and to finger Washington bigwigs on the take. A convincing thriller starring a little-known Federal law enforcement group, with a terrific green backlash scenario.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Rogue bureaucrats, international terrorists, Cajun outlaws, and the odd carnivore gang up on a heavily outnumbered undercover team from the US Fish and Wildlife Service. Only the fish are neutral in Goddard's (The Alchemist, Balefire) bloody, entertaining, eco-thriller. Well, why not? There probably are two-fisted Fish and Wildlife employees who don't talk in that ultrasoothing PBS drone. What is perhaps harder to swallow is Goddard's suggestion that there might be high-level Cabinet officials with the nerve and imagination to buy into Operation Counter Wrench--a vicious, well-funded, semiprivate effort to ruin the world green movement with a series of spectacular terrorist acts to be blamed on overzealous eco- weenies. Fortunately for the balance of nature, former San Diego cop Henry Lightstone has been recruited to the Department of the Interior's supersecret task force of undercover wildlife rangers. Disguised as a free-spending hunter with Teddy Rooseveltian appetites, Lightstone hires the vicious, criminal, forbidden-game- hunting Chareaux brothers of Louisiana to help him bag bears in Yellowstone National Park and then stumbles into Operation Wrench, where he finds himself battling grizzlies cheek by jowl with an undersecretary and a beautiful Brooklyn politician who's only truly satisfied when her life is threatened with immense natural danger. The creatures from inside the Beltway quickly show themselves to be ten times more dangerous than the wildlife. Goddard, director of The National Fish and Wildlife Forensics Laboratory, packs in enough authentic fin-and-critter detail to pull off his extraordinarily far-fetched and relentlessly violent plot. Not for the fainthearted. -- Copyright ©1992, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
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