Tara Chase is back and as tough as ever!!!

books:


	• Private Wars (Queen and Country) Greg Rucka Bantam, 2006 - 544 pages average customer review:based on 12 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Rucka's best!

In an age where one might think that the spy novel is a thing of the past, Rucka scores with a timely, action packed, intense read that will keep you up until the wee hours. You've already read the details......too much detail if you ask me....suffice to say that Rucka's Tara Chase is a compelling, enviably well conceived character, who leads us careening through a fascinating and exhilarating insider's view of a modern day female James Bond.
This is undoubtedly Greg Rucka's best novel to date, and that's saying something.

Back in the Chace

Greg Rucka's "Private Wars" picks up precisely where "A Gentleman's Game" left off, with an exhausted and depressed British spy, Tara Chase, returning to her intel job as "Minder One" (aka chief assassin). But not for long. Denied a leave of absence when she becomes pregnant, she quits. But within a year, despite her new motherhood, she returns to the game to try to set things right in Uzbekistan, where an evil sister contends with a self-righteous brother for the job of President (probably for life) as their father lies dying.

Betrayed by her own agency as well as the U.S. CIA, she . . . well, read it for yourself. To say more would be to spoil things. Suffice it to say here that nothing goes as planned.

The book is, in addition to a great suspense novel, a great character study. Tara Chase (and I hope Mr. Rucka has more tales to tell about her), despite her graphic-novel origins, emerges in the novels as a living, breathing character. She's flawed, of course (maybe half crazy), and maybe you'll wonder at the morals of a woman who would leave a 16-month old child with caregivers while she goes off on missions that perhaps she will not return from. And her intel bosses seem more interested in scheming for power than in righting wrongs. (The whole mission begins because of the attempt by one British intelligence officer, who wants to keep his job, to bring down another.)

The ending is beyond cynical.

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Good, but not on my "A" list...

After reading the first Queen and Country novel, A Gentleman's Game, and being moderately entertained, I decided to try Greg Rucka's follow-up called Private Wars. I think I'll end up reading more by Rucka, but they probably won't be on my A-list...

Tara Chace is back after losing the father of her unborn child at the end of a botched mission in the Middle East. She's had it with government politics and espionage, and wants nothing more to do with it. Until she realizes that now she's really just like everyone else, with no real direction in life other than raising her daughter as a secretive single mother living with her dead lover's mother. Her boredom gets the best of her, and she's lured back into the game when she's offered a chance to extract an Uzbekistan politician who might well be killed by his sister in a government coup. That mission becomes a fiasco when it's found that her handlers really just want to find some missing anti-aircraft missiles, and they really don't care to support the Uzbek politician. She's captured, tortured, and is close to being murdered before her release is secured at the last moment. The fear and humiliation of the ordeal fuels her desire for revenge, and she jumps at the chance to go back into Uzbek territory a few months later to clean up the original mission (and dish out a little retribution in the process). She has to guess who might be telling the truth, who might be playing her, and which side she wants to support...

Generally I liked the book, but I tended to get bogged down when the story turned to internal politics of the English intelligence service. I was never quite following who was aligning with who and for what reason, and I'm sure that probably caused me to miss a bit of the story-line of Chace's missions. When the story focused on Chace and the actual mission, it was pretty good reading. And towards the end, things really flew. But this was the type of book that I could finish in a couple days if I really get into it. Instead, it took me a week and I was reading a number of other books at the same time. No real compulsion to keep turning pages...

If I have the chance to read another Rucka novel, I probably will. It'll probably sit around for a bit if there are other books in the pile, though...

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Tara Chase is back and as tough as ever!!!

In the sequel to Greg Rucka's A Gentleman's Game, British SIS agent, Tara Chase returns for one of the most challenging and dangerous missions of her career. In the newest novel of this stunning series, Private Wars begins with Chase finding out that she's pregnant with her dead lover's (Tom Wallace) baby. When she puts in a request for a temporary leave of absence with her boss, Paul Crocker, the request is denied and she quits her position as Minder One in anger. Not knowing what else to do, Chase tracks down Wallace's mother in England and tells her that she's having her dead son's child. Chase then moves in with Val Wallace and spends the next year-and-a-half having the little girl and raising her. Everything comes to a halt when Crocker suddenly appears at her doorstep, needing her expertise for a secret mission into an East European country to rescue the son and grandson of its dying President. It seems as though the President's daughter is determined to take over after her father anyway she can, even if it means killing her brother and young nephew. Her lover, who's the head of the country's secret police, has already raped and murdered her brother's wife and now wants to take out the sibling. Chase's job is to get the President's son and grandson out of the country before they can be murdered. The problem is that Chase must do it with little help from her superiors and without the American government finding out. Also, she must find a way to get through twelve armed men who have the son under house arrest, waiting for orders to kill him. Chase, however, manages a miracle and just about succeeds in her mission, until there's an unexpected betrayal from the American side. She's captured and then faces a slow, torturing death at the hands of the secret police. Nothing has prepared her for what she'd have to endure and nothing will ever be the same. Private Wars takes the "Tara Chase" series to a whole new level. It's an even faster read than the first novel with unbelievable action and suspense. The characters are more developed, the plot richer in context, and it's a very difficult book to put down even for a minute. The ending will leave you feeling empty, wishing there had been another alternative and knowing that governments seldom care about the suffering of one individual. Along with the "Atticus Kodiak" series, author Greg Rucka has another winner in Tara Chase. I hope Mr. Rucka will keep this new series alive because I want to read more novels with Chase as the lead character. She's one tough lady who's not afraid to kill, or to call her boss an idiot. This is great reading and a lot of fun!

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A Fine Effort, A Fine Balance

Greg Rucka's second Queen & Country novel is a fine effort with a wonderful payoff for those fans left hanging by A Gentleman's Game. His grasp of the internal politics of the MI-6 and alusions to the current Blair Government ring true. Political sketches of the situation in many of the former Soviet republics of Central Asia also are spot on. Uzbekistan is a particularly poignant setting for a Anglo-centric spy thriller given its nexus as a staging ground for the US GWOT, for regional ethnic tensions, breedign ground for islamic extremism, and, most importantly, some of the most egregious human rights abuses recorded in recent memory. Tashkent hosts a thuggish regime, that has particularly been salt in the wounds of British Government politics thanks to Craig Murray, and could very realistically have produced the characters that Rucka fleshes out so admirably in these pages.

Vauxhall Cross is also the staging ground for intrigue as we see how Paul Crocker's relations with his Chief of Service deteriorate until a final end game results in a most satisfying coup d'gras. Francis Barclay is one character that anyone could love to hate. He gets his comeuppance.

Tara Chace will forever be a heartbreaking character. A tragic figure. Rucka stays true to form. There will be no happy endings for Miss Chace...she's not meant to have them and I am not sure that she deserves one. What a fabulously realised character.

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reviews: page 1, 2, 3

Only Greg Rucka, the thriller genre?s most fearless writer, would dare create a spy so edgy, so explosive, so extreme, she should be rated X.

Tara Chace was once the most dangerous woman alive. And now that the international spy network thinks she?s as good as dead, she?s even more dangerous than ever.

Only one thing could coax Tara back into the game: a chance to vindicate herself. The torture and execution of Dina Malikov has set off a cutthroat grab for power in strategically crucial Uzbekistan. Tara?s job is to slip into the country and extract Dina?s pro-Western husband and their young son before they are murdered?by his ruthless sister.

But there are a couple of wild cards in the deck, including a missing mobile weapons system that can bring down a commercial airliner, not to mention powerful political careers. Now, as she vanishes into hostile territory with a man who may or may not be what he seems, Tara is going to find out that the war on terror is more terrifying than anyone knows. For in a battle where betrayal is a conventional weapon, loyalty is a weakness, and anyone?even a child?is a legitimate target: it?s every spy, every woman, for herself.

Combine a thriller that defies every expectation with a heroine for whom nothing is out of bounds, and the result is Private Wars, a suspense novel so explosively realistic, it should be classified.

From the Hardcover edition.

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