The
Shell Game
Non-series
Steve Alten
Sweetwater Books (Hardcover)
ISBN-10: 1-59955-094-6 (1599550946)
ISBN-13: 978-1-59955-094-7 (9781599550947)
Publication Date: January 2008
List Price: $26.95
Synopsis (from
the publisher): The story opens in 2007 when two CIA spooks meet with
an American Colonel in military intelligence. The war is going badly,
and President Bush, who steadfastly refuses to back down, remains
unchallenged at home as Democrats and Republicans continue to toss
verbal grenades – positioning themselves for the 2008 elections.
Meanwhile, Iran’s pursuit of nuclear energy will yield enriched
uranium within five years -- uranium that can be used to manufacture
suitcase nukes.
The United States’ military is too drained to invade Iran, and a
preemptive strike is out of the question...unless a nuclear detonation
were to occur on in American city -- the enriched uranium traced back
to Iran. A U.S. reprisal would strike a death-blow against radical
Islam, quell the insurgent violence in Iraq...and yield more oil. Yes,
the cost is unthinkable – but if we sit back and do nothing then
one day a dozen suitcase bombs could go off in a dozen American cities
– bringing with it anarchy and the collapse of Western
civilization.
December 2011: Ashley “Ace” Futrell is an oil expert
working for PetroConsultants, married to Kelli Doyle, a former National
Security Advisor and one of the CIA spooks from the opening scene. When
Kelli threatens to expose the plot, Ace finds his existence hurtling
down a rabbit’s hole of deceit where the orchestrated lies of the
powerful few could lead to the darkest days of human existence... and
the death knell for billions.
Review: Steve Alten's near-future thriller, The Shell Game, is such a ridiculous shambles of a novel that it's hard to take it seriously. It's even harder to objectively review.
Conspiracy theorists, radical left-wingers, and the cultural elite will believe Alten speaks the gospel truth in The Shell Game
and need read no further here. Everyone else, regardless of political
ideology, will likely find the book an aimless and insipid mess.
The Shell Game takes
place, for the most part, in late 2011 and early 2012. John McKuhn (a
very thinly disguised John McCain) is President, having been elected
over his Democratic opponents Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama (no name
substitutions apparently required) in 2008 due to voting machine fraud,
vicious personal attack ads, and countless other
dirty deeds attributed to the Republican Party. Leaders of that very
same party later assassinate McKuhn ensuring that the Vice President, a
hard line conservative in the mold of an even more thinly disguised
Dick Cheney, assumes office prior to the election in 2012. None of this
is important to the story, but Alten includes it (and much, much, much
more) as political fact disguised as political fiction in an effort to
get his decidedly one-sided point of view across.
The Shell Game reads
more like an unfinished outline for a book than a book itself with
chapters that seem almost randomly placed. There are a number of
intersecting storylines, none of which are credible and none of which
make a lot of sense, that seem half sketched out and not entirely
completed. The two primary ones are a plot to bankrupt the ruling
monarchy of Saudi Arabia, and a plot to detonate a nuclear weapon on
American soil. Alten, not so subtly, pins both of these plots on the
Republicans, specifically "neo-cons", a term he uses with such contempt
that killers of baby seals are model stewards of the planet in
comparison.
Alten might be forgiven for writing such an appalling and tasteless
novel had he not tried to make his futuristic allegations more
believable by beginning each chapter with quotes from government
documents (some "secret"), mainstream literature, historical figures,
pop culture leaders, even the Bible. The quotes are, of course, taken
completely out of context and serve only to justify Alten's unrelenting
bashing of the Republican Party in general, and the current Bush
administration in particular. The more credible he tries to be, the
more incredible (in the strict definition of the word) he becomes.
Regardless of whether one agrees with Alten's politics or not, The Shell Game
is a poorly written and plotted book with one-dimensional characters,
mindless dialog, and vapid narrative. It is not a thriller in any sense
of the word and is noteworthy only because it is likely to be the worst book of the year, if not the entire decade.
Special thanks to Blanco and Peace for providing an ARC of The Shell Game for this review.
Review Copyright © 2008 — Hidden Staircase Mystery Books — All Rights Reserved.
Other thrillers by this author ...
Goliath
Forge (Hardcover), July 2002
ISBN-10: 0-7653-0064-8 (0765300648)
The Loch
Tsunami Books (Hardcover), April 2005
ISBN-10: 0-9761659-0-2 (0976165902)
The Shell Game
Sweetwater (Hardcover), January 2008
ISBN-10: 1-59955-094-6 (1599550946)
ISBN-13: 978-1-59955-094-7 (9781599550947)
Omnimystery keywords for The Shell Game ...
Location(s) referenced: to be determined.