Craig Thomas
![Winter Hawk Craig Thomas]( "Winter Hawk Craig Thomas")
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By: Avon Books (Mm)
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Subjects -> Mystery & Thrillers -> Authors, A-Z -> ( T ) -> Thomas, Craig
Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 5
Average rating: 4.5 of 5
Firefox in reverse... 4 out of 5 stars.
2 of 4 people found this review helpful.
If I remember correctly, this would be the third Gant book. People who have read or seen Firefox should like this if only to complete Gant's story. Not so much on the "techno" part of the techno-thriller genre but pretty interesting from the logistical point of view.
Their Finest Hours 5 out of 5 stars.
2 of 2 people found this review helpful.
In "Winterhawk", the Americans are desperate to pluck from deep within Soviet territory a Russian scientist offering the west proof that the Soviets will launch a laser satellite, an orbiting battlestation, on the eve of a major new arms treaty. Too late to back out of the treaty, the Americans face the prospect of Soviet military supremacy established in orbit and working its way down to the surface. Their only way-out: use a captured Russian helicopter flown by a crack CIA pilot deep into the Soviet military-industrial spaceflight complex near baikonour and rescue the man and his photographic proof. Were "Winterhawk" the work of any other writer, the CIA pilot would be some handsome but rule-flouting ace hotshot who doesn't let politicians or bureaucrats get in the way of mission he just knows he can pull-off. But "Winterhawk" is the baby of Craig Thomas, and the maverick is none other than Mitchell Gant, the burnt-out Vietnam air-war vet who barely survived "Firefox" and "Firefox Down". Almost saturated with a mentality of defeat, Gant remains ready to thrown in the towel, almost begging for the missile or bullet or karate chop that will end the mission...and his misery.
Reuniting with KGB Col. Priabin from "Firefox Down", "Winterhawk" becomes someting of a sequel to that book and the final leg in a loose trilogy begun with "Firefox". Thomas usually arranges his books into loose arcs (like those involving the Russian, Petrunin, and Babbington, the British turncoat of "Lion's Run", "Wildcat" and "Last Raven"), but there's an insistence on linking the books in time ("Winterhawk" is meant to occur within two years of "Firefox Down", though the earlier book occurred no later than 1983 when Andropov was still KGB chief, and the events of latter book - including CD's and the Russian space shuttle are clearly late 1980's) and in meaning - with the bloodlust that Gant unwittingly inspired in Priabin in the last book is too great a factor in this one.
Yet Thomas knows better than to write incomplete books, and "Winterhawk" remains absorbing on its own terms. His writing remains crisp, his prose fast paced and his perspectives delightfully claustrophobic. Nobody knows what's about to hit them. Thomas' charachters drive this book, perhaps more than those of "Firefox" and ist sequel - while Gant ruled those books, there isn't a charachter in "Winterhawk" who doesn't threaten to conquer the rest and impose his stamp on the bulk of the novel. When the brutish, almost simian Red Army Col. Serov meets his fate, I almost cried at the possibilities of his appearance in another Thomas epic that will now never be. Bringing the crew together not only creates a perfectly spaced and timed plot, but creates perhaps the most cinematographic of Thomas' novels. Instead of building a tale around the hero's sitting in a chair (admittedly an ejector seat within a high-performance jet, but sitting all the same), we have Gant racing through the industrial space complex with parallel subplots involving Priabin and the turncoat Russian scientist, the Red Army General and his son, and a female KGB aid of whom Priabin is "fond of" , all working with each other and against each other, switching sides at a maddening pace building up to a deafening climax.
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