The Devil's Halo [Paperback]

America's only hope lies in an American economic spy and his wife, a brilliant scientist from the Pentagon's Advanced Research Projects Agency. Terry Weston went to Moscow to reclaim a stolen movie disk, having no clue that he would soon become the sole line of defense against what would soon become known as E-Day. The stolen movie's importance lay in its encryption, which was based on the Pentagon's own stalwart encryption. Someone had decrypted it, and the CIA needed to know who, how, and why. Economic spies normally don't see a whole lot of James Bond-type action, but Weston, with his wife and little girl in imminent danger themselves, is compelled to go above and beyond the call of duty in service to his country.

The Westons have some remarkable high-tech gadgetry at their disposal that provides them with intelligence they could never have gotten the old-fashioned way. They can only stay a step ahead of the enemy for so long, however, and that is when things get really tricky. Weston finds himself cutting deals with bad guys even as he questions whom he can really trust among the good guys - there's a mole somewhere close, personally connected with his wife's military-industrial father. To make matters worse, the powers that be back home aren't inclined to listen to his dire warnings of an imminent national defense disaster. The story doesn't end with the arrival of E-Day, either; in fact, that's when things really get interesting.

The Devil's Halo is a meticulously crafted thriller that covers a lot of ground (with activity taking place across three continents as well as outer space). I can only hope the high-tech espionage and technological intrigues of the book aren't as plausible as Fox makes them sound - this book is quite realistic enough to be a little bit scary. Many pundits (and non-pundits like myself) believe a showdown of one sort or another between America and Europe is inevitable. Russia is an ally in name only, France - well, don't even get me started on France, and the issue of planetary defense has already played a major role in modern history. The specter of SDI got Gorbachev to the bargaining table with Reagan, so it's certainly conceivable that the establishment of a Space Shield by the Americans would compel the Russians and French to take drastic steps to avoid a repeat of such ignominy.

The bottom line is that The Devil's Halo isn't your run-of-the-mill spy thriller. It's more immediate, more realistic, more sophisticated, and more compelling than most other novels of its kind. It has everything I was looking for in a spy thriller for the twenty-first century.

Told from Terry's prospective the details of spying and of the electronic and psychological give the book a background and depth that will keep the reader turning pages. The military aspect is as thrilling and realistic as any book ever written.

Author Chris Fox has used his extensive subject knowledge to create a world thick with danger, intrigue and thrills. This is an absolute must-read.

Here, Terry Weston, an industrial espionage specialist on contract to the CIA, and his brilliant and beautiful DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) consultant wife, Maria, team up to counter a diabolical plot by the Machiavellian French spy master Jean-Claude Maistre and Russian strongman Sergei Maleshnekov to neutralize American GPS satellites and destroy the U.S. military's space-dependent hegemony.

THE DEVIL'S HALO benefits from a plot that is fast paced, clever, and which features a lot of nifty gadgets, nail-biting moments, and two very engaging protagonists. If I can make a cross-genre comparison, it resembles any of the recent and very entertaining 007 films starring Pierce Brosnan. Like the latter, however, this book defies plausibility and is short on character development. Since, in my fifth and sixth decades of reading, I've come to value such things - such as one will find in spy novels by John le Carre and Gerald Seymour - I'm knocking off a fifth star from THE DEVIL'S HALO when other readers wouldn't. It's a personal thing, and in no way a criticism of the author's ability to create a riveting potboiler.

I especially liked Maria's inventions, the super-miniaturized robotic spy planes, Fly and Mosquito. I'd like to think such amazing technology exists, but it likely doesn't - not yet, anyway.

The books weakest chapter is the very last, short one in which Fox wraps up the storyline with a pie-in-the-sky view of a peaceful New World that's about as naive a vision as anything I've read recently. Where are the Chinese and the Islamic fundamentalists? They must be stirring the pot somewhere. Perhaps Chris is saving them for another Weston adventure.