Devil in False Colors

By starrymag | February 18, 2017

By: Emma Sterner-Radley

 

WARNING: This review will contain some spoilers.

 

This is the third book with former FBI agent (now with the Joint Terrorism Task Force) Lara Edmond and Mossad agent Uri Levin as the protagonists. I’d like to start off with clarifying that I have not read the first two books, written by Jack Winnick, and so I am reviewing this book as a standalone story.

 

Starting off with a vicious attack in a Jewish school, this thriller leads us into a tale where agents from America and Israel team up to take down terrorists who are behind several terror attacks. We get to see Lara Edmond and Uri Levin go undercover to try and unearth the responsible aggressors. But, are the attackers who they seem to be? A tangled web of political scheming and behind-closed-doors intrigue that reaches as far as Russia is soon unveiled.

 

This is a political thriller with a military tint. Thrillers may not be in my top three of genres, but are certainly in my top five. So, I looked forward to this read. I found that it was more than your average thriller in many ways. Some positive and some negative.

 

If you like your suspense in the shape of a political thriller filled with countries being set against each other – and filled with gory details of severed heads and people making the sound of a ripe melon being crushed as they are stabbed – this is your kind of story. If you struggle with maiming, torture, rape and descriptive violent deaths (some of them being very young children) then it’s not.

 

Devil in False Colors centers around a very important subject – the war on terror – and wants to show us a view that we in the western world might not see, the one from inside groups of radical, extremist Muslims. This is rare and interesting to see.

 

The third-person omniscient point of view that this book is written in brings us into the mind of Americans, Muslims and Jews. We get introduced to a great many characters, some more important to the plot than others. It does hop from being inside certain characters heads a little too fast for me, especially in the scenes between Lara and Uri, making me dizzy as we see her thoughts and his in the same paragraph. But perhaps that is just me being used to many modern books being in first person or third person limited/multiple narrative.

 

Now, we get to a very difficult matter. There were times where I felt this book’s plot was obscured by political discourse. It was fascinating to hear from a writer who has experience and insights into the alien and horrifying world of religious extremists, but I felt like I was being led to seeing things from a certain standpoint instead of being told a narrative. Thus, making me feel like this book was at times more non-fiction than fiction.

 

The reader was constantly shown who are the villains and who are the heroes,and I hasten to add that the villains were written chillingly well. But as these opposing groups didn’t so much feel like the fictional characters within the story – but actual groups of people in the real world – it became uncomfortable to read at times. This discomfort could easily have been avoided by showing some of the heroes’ humility and flaws (the only negative trait I could find from anyone not Muslim is America’s “liberal” and “politically correct politics,” which are shown as something very damaging in this story.) I’m not counting the rhetoric we hear from the radicals, as that is coded as lies and exaggerations and so the reader has to ignore it. Another way to avoid it would have been upping the part of the good and non-violent Muslims that briefly flash past in the book.

 

That is my personal opinion shaped by my own worldview and as this is a work of fiction the writer is obviously free to write from any political standpoint. I only bring it up as a warning flag for anyone who has a different or more neutral outlook and might be frustrated or offended by this book. So, let’s put that aside and try to treat this as a purely fictional book.

 

Let’s start with a look at our protagonists, Uri and Lara. The romance between them was written in an interesting and emotionally complex way. However, it was short enough to not interfere with the plot, which is good if you’re not partial to too much character interaction or don’t want any romance in your thriller. But if you want to see these characters fleshed out more and empathise with them, you might wonder why the romance was written in a way that it could be removed without making much difference to the narrative. I would have wanted to see more of Lara and Uri to empathise with them and become invested. Perhaps I need to have read the two first books for that, but as I said, I’m reviewing this book as a stand-alone piece so I don’t have that luxury. Although, I could have done without the sex scenes which I didn’t feel added to the romance. (And the way it was written might not be everyone’s cup of tea.)

 

Back to the characters. As it stands, I feel more invested in Uri than Lara. Not just because his behaviour in the book makes more sense to me than Lara’s does, but because I felt that I got to know him a little more than I did Lara. In the chapters where he goes undercover his interactions with the people around him flesh the character out with the old writer’s trick of “show, don’t tell.” For example: not telling us readers that a character is patient, but showing that he’s patient through his actions.

 

Lara; however, remains a mystery to me as she feels quite two-dimensional and often confusing. We are told that she is talented in “computer based communications,” but we don’t see her using that in this book to any extent. We are told that she is competent and, as the writer puts it, “a match for any man.” Yet I don’t feel that we get to see that in the story except for a few occasions of violence. I would argue that physical prowess isn’t enough to prove that she is competent. The fact that she was warned that her undercover plan was unwise and dangerous and still went through with it (leading to an inevitably failed mission where she had to be rescued) doesn’t make me take her seriously. It is unsure what that was meant to tell us about her personality. I’d like to assume that it was meant to show that she is daring and willing to risk herself for the cause, but to me it just came off as that she was rash and bad at her job. Perhaps that was what we meant to see, but that doesn’t make her very skilled at her job – which we are told she is.

 

I was looking forward to a female led story and want to thank the author for having a female protagonist in a political thriller. I really wanted to identify with Lara, as I usually do with female protagonists, but I couldn’t. I found myself lost with the characterisation of her. I would have liked to see more about her personality and her actions than being told how attractive, frail-looking and lovely she is. The image of her I was left with was a prettified version of Carrie Mathison from the show “Homeland,” but without the compelling backstory and fleshed out personality. Perhaps seeing more scenes (or just more scenes varying in content) from her point of view might have remedied the problem and made me connect with her as I did with Uri? Although, I have to admit that I wouldn’t have minded seeing more characterisation of Uri either and, most of all, more character development from them both as the story progressed.

 

As Lara’s plan to go undercover as a blonde bride for Muslim radicals hung over the plot as a sword of Damocles – I sighed and sat back and waited for there to be a rape scene. When that scene appeared, I was at least relieved that it stayed at an attempt, as she managed to skilfully fight off her assailant, which gave us more of the gory, blood-squirting details that this book so amply provides and that I know many thriller readers appreciate. Personally, I was happy to see her not be saved by a man at that occasion.

 

Thanks to the brief encounters with the side characters of Mary and Sarah – this book manages to pass the Bechdel test (two female characters talking to each other about something else than a man), but there is still a divide between the amount of named male characters to the fewer female ones. Let’s focus on the thriller aspects of this book though. There are some fast-paced suspense sections, especially the two rescues of our main characters, and they drew me back into the plot. If you like books about undercover spies you’ll find parts to sink your teeth into here.

 

There seems to be a lot of thorough research put into the political aspects of this book, as well as the details of procedures and weapons for agents of the American government and the Mossad. I was very impressed by that. The foreword tells us that the author has been “a Middle East scholar for over forty years, traveling to the area for the State Department for the purpose of technology transfer to the Arab nations, and cooperation between Israel and Egypt. He has been a strong advocate for the State of Israel for over forty years.” That obviously increases my belief in the accuracy of the details and certainly shines through in the story.

 

Other than the bigger issues described above, there are some minor things that took me out of the narrative. Granted, this might not be things that bother others. I will still bring them up in case these are bugbears for prospective readers or might distract them as it did me.

 

Any editor reading this might shake their heads at the overuse of exclamation marks (and sometimes even double exclamations) and the habit of “telling” us things that would have been better “shown.” (See my explanation of “show and tell” above.) I was mostly distracted by the repetitions of information we have already been given (one example is that we are told by several characters that Daesh is what Westerners call Isis or Isil.) There are a few issues of the same ilk, but these are details of the writing craft and I’m sure most readers just gloss over them.

 

Writing books is horribly hard and writing something that everyone will like is impossible. So, when I review I try to be unbiased and find both the good and the bad in every book. It pains me that I found quite a few issues in this book, which took away from my enjoyment. Perhaps this isn’t a book for a European, agnostic woman with social liberal views and I accept that.

 

A more light-hearted caution is that this book will probably have you craving coffee as we get to see quite a lot of appreciative coffee drinking. (Strangely, mainly from the villains.) However, the craving for several cups of hot black coffee that this book brought with it was a plus for this reviewer.