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Drone thriller 5/26/2014 9:13:46 AM
Said thriller writer Stephen Coonts of Richard Clarke’s new thriller, Sting of the Drone, “This rip-snorting thriller may be the best unclassified peek you will ever get on the new high-tech offensive in the war against terrorism. A seminal, prophetic, troubling must-read.”
Publishers Weekly gave the book, out two weeks ago from Thomas Dunne Books, a starred review. Those are hard to come by.
Said the reviewer in part, “Insider knowledge of politics paired with amazing state-of-the-art technical details fuels this realistic nonstop action thriller, the best yet from Clarke... [Clarke] has set the standard by which all such titles in this growing subgenre will be measured.”
Clarke has an advantage over most thriller writers who want to spin out a tale about drone warfare. As the National Coordinator for Security and Counter-Terrorism for three presidents, he was a key man in developing our national drone program.
Clarke knows the hardware. He knows how drone operators work, their procedures and the decisions they have to make. He knows what happens after a drone fires its missile. And he knows what can happen when those attacked strike back.
Said Clarke in an NPR interview with Lynn Neary, he takes readers “behind the curtain to see things they would never get a chance to see, to raise questions that readers should ask: What is it that we are doing? Is this [attacking terrorists with drones] the right thing to do? What are the risks we run if we do it?”
But at the top of his list, Clarke said he set out to write a thriller readers will stay with until the last page. Those who read the book before publication say he’s done that.
I don’t think so.
I’ve read the 13 pages Amazon has posted, and they are clunky.
Those pages don’t show a mastery of the writer’s craft. It makes me wonder what Thomas Dunne’s editors were doing when Clarke’s manuscript was before them, drinking Schnapps-laced coffee perhaps.
Clarke piles in tiny, tiny details not necessary to telling a good story. And his speech tags . . . my writers group would never let Clarke get away with “the Justice Department representative interjected.”
I know, 13 pages is not enough to judge the story. Sting of the Drone indeed may be, as Stephen Coonts says, a rip-snorter.
Coonts and David Morrell, who also blurbed the book, write openings that grab the reader, that suck us into a story that races forward.
Clarke’s opening pages are, well, yawners.
The action begins to pick up on page 4 when a drone pilot spots something unusual on the screen from his drone’s cameras.
