Critical Mass
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4.2 • 38 Ratings
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- $7.99
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- $7.99
Publisher Description
Jocelyn "Joss" Cole, a burned-out public defender from L.A., has opted for a quieter life in the San Juan Islands of Washington State. Joss has no significant clients other than a group of commercial fisherman suffering from a strange and serious illness, a condition that doctors cannot diagnose, and which Joss believes has an industrial cause. Then into her office comes Dean Belden, a well-heeled client in search of a lawyer to help him set up a business in the islands. Within days Belden is subpoenaed to appear before a federal grand jury. Less than an hour after testifying, and before Joss can discover what happened in the secrecy of the grand jury room, Belden dies in a fiery explosion of his float plane on Seattle's Lake Union. Gideon Van Ry is a nuclear fission expert and a scholar in residence at the Center for Nonproliferation Studies in Monterey, California. One of his duties is to update the Center's database, an extensive catalog listing fissionable materials and weapons of mass destruction. Gideon is troubled by the apparent failure to account for two small tactical nuclear devices missing from a storage facility in the former Soviet Union.The two weapons were last seen in packing crates, to be shipped to an American company called Belden Electronics. Gideon has been unable to locate this firm, and now he is left with only one possible lead, the lawyer who incorporated the company-Jocelyn Cole. Fraught with tension and suspense, Critical Mass is Steve Martini at his electrifying best. It is the story of what can happen in a world where private hate and public apathy combine to uncork the sleeping but deadly genie of nuclear terror.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
A militia group in the Pacific Northwest becomes the world's newest nuclear power in this by-the-numbers thriller by the author of The List and The Judge. Lawyer Jocelyn "Joss" Cole sees a big retainer when she's hired by Dean Belden to handle his company's incorporation filings. But after Belden gets a federal subpoena, Joss sees him die in a fiery seaplane explosion. Now she's the only visible link to Belden's company (which was on the receiving end of two decaying nuclear weapons smuggled into the U.S. out of Russia), and that brings her to the attention of arms inspector Gideon van Ry, of the Institute Against Mass Destruction. After the feds determine that the militia has possession of the weapons, Gideon and Joss join the race to try to avert nuclear disaster. Of course, there are complications: the militia group is being fronted by a foreign power in order to circumvent U.S. nuclear retaliation policy, and the President is in CYA (cover-your-ass) overdrive because his party accepted a campaign contribution from the chief Russian culprit. But even with a SEAL assault on the militia stronghold, double crosses galore and an ingenious ending, the book offers too few surprises, too little suspense and too little emotional involvement. The characters have no inner life, and the plotting is sketchy from the start, when it's explained that dummies were used to cover up for the two missing nukes--dummies that conveniently drop off the weapons count while there's still time to foil the bad guys. The few crucial coincidences stick out like red flags because Martini makes more of them than he makes of the people around them.
Customer Reviews
Critical mass
Fast paced,grabs you from the first to last word! Couldn’t put down, so well crafted and ingenious plot.
Martini's biases
Martini knows how to weave a spell-binder much better than most, and with one exception, I enjoy his books. The exception is that he absolutely, fundamentally, irrevocably, cannot refrain from wearing his biases on his sleeve. It's his perfect right not to like either the government on the one hand or higher education on the other, but as I read further into his corpus (and I've completed the entire Paul Madriani series), I find myself having to scroll through an ever-growing number of paragraphs simply to avoid them.
In Critical Mass, for instance, the book is barely getting started before the reader is assaulted with two adjacent awful errors. The first is the character who wants to become a college teacher. In the space of a few sentences -- and hence a few months at the most -- he moves from TA to professor and then is denied "a tenured position." *No one* moves from TA directly to assistant professor. No one. TA is a grad-student rank that would never be offered to, much less accepted by, a Ph.D. (I'm a university teacher.)
The character then marries a woman who starts a book-keeping business and a family. Martini subjects us to several excruciating and false pages of narrative where her business is assaulted by the IRS at the cost of "millions of dollars" of IRS resources and no target data. All of this is premised on a business-ID error that a fourth-grader could have resolved, but Martini's anti-governmental bias is so radical that he can't admit that the IRS could have seen it. "The IRS doesn't make mistakes." Well yes, it does, but rarely so egregious as Martini's.
The wife eventually takes her own life, which is close to what I felt like after these nauseating narratives. Except for one thing: I was laughing too hard.
Come on, Martini. Grow up. Uninformed and multi-page biases are for losers like Tom Clancy. You can do better than this.