The Cutout

Rating:
Summary: A New Master of Intrigue...Francine Mathews!
Review: I bought this book about 10 hours ago and despite the Oscars on t.v., I started reading it and could not put it down. I read through the 400 pages in about six hours!!

This is one of the best air port fiction on international intrigue in recent memory. Forget techno babble of Tom Clancy, and contrived dribbles of other ersatz "thriller" writers out there today, let's hope that Francine Mathews comes out with sequel after sequel! And forget too Jack Ryan, there is a new fictional hero at the CIA: Caroline Carmichael!!

The gist of the plot: still grieving the loss of her husband, a CIA operative who perished in a plan crash some three years ago, Caroline Carmichael, an analyst for the CIA is called into work on the kidnapping of the Vice President of the U.S. Carmichael then learns that her dead husband is alive and behind the kidnapping. What follows then is a mixture of creative and intriguing fictional narrative, lessons in political history of Central Europe, and studies of three dimensional characters that make you feel that every thing that the writer writes of is REAL and that you are RIGHT there as the actions happen.

This is the kind of air port fiction that only a well researched writer with an ear for dialogue, knowledge of history and politics, and emotional sensitivity for relationships that exist between a man and a woman, a child and a parent, a teacher and a student can write about.

In the past, when I wanted action and intrigue in a novel, I had to sacrifice good writing and emotional depth, but with Mathews, I sacrified nothing but time that it took to read the book. If you love well written political thrillers, if you want a fresh voice with a new outlook and and an intelligent voice, get this book and watch it climb the ladder to a number one best seller which this book will soon become!

Rating:
Summary: Great book, great ending
Review: This book not only kept you turining the pages, but the storyline was believable and very well-written. The book was filled with twists and turns and new information to make the mystery a little more fun. The author kept throwing in great details that never made a single page worth skimming!

Rating:
Summary: Relentless Suspense...I couldn't put it down!
Review: While giving a controversial speech in Berlin, the Vice President of the United States is kidnapped by a known group of neo-nazi terrorists. What is surprising and shocking to CIA analyst Caroline Carmichael is that one of the extremists appears to be her dead husband, also a CIA agent, who was supposedly killed years ago in a plane crash.

The Cutout is drenched with international intrigue, espionage, biological terrorism, vivid details of what it is like to work inside the CIA (thanks to the author's real-life work experience as an analyst), maps of eastern and central Europe (as to not lose the reader geographically), and marvelous psychological suspense.

Francine Mathews clearly knows her stuff and she does a terrific job of leading us through the maze of espionage activities from the vantage point of one who has worked in this arena, without losing our interest. Actually, the only thing I lost while reading this book was about 6 hours of sleep!

Well worth it, I might add.

Highly recommended.

Cris