Listen to Russ discuss his novel on the Cindi Sullivan show on 84 WHAS:
Agent of Influence
Author: Russell Hamilton
Publisher: iUniverse (March 1, 2010)
ISBN: 9781440145452
Rating: Four Stars (out of Five)
Agent of InfluenceThe gruesome killing of a prize racehorse in Kentucky in 1973; the murder of two tourists on a Las Vegas roller coaster decades later; the naturalization of Nevada Senator Zach Hardin, whose Egyptian childhood is a closed book: Seemingly random events pile up in this thriller faster than potato chips pouring out of a bag, and before long, the bad guys are in position to deal the US a blow from which it might never recover.
Agent of Influence starts out with a tease, as President-elect Hardin, the horniest president since JFK, encounters a beautiful chestnut-eyed stripper called “Marilyn”—just in time for the Secret Service to ruin all his fun.
But Marilyn’s plans are soon altered when the “pre-training exercises” she’s performing to test the mettle of new CIA recruits turn into the real thing. As Alex Bryce and his CIA handler Anna Starks, a.k.a. Marilyn, delve into the new president’s past, they discover disturbing evidence of Zach’s connection to the shadowy “Muslim Brotherhood” and the “True Muslim Caliphate.”
Author Russell Hamilton does a good job of presenting believable motivations for all the characters, including the bad guys. Readers can understand why Egyptian nationals like Hussan, for example, might resent having their lands “carved up like pie and divvied out to gluttonous victors who did as they pleased [after World War I].” And why they might want to change things. Readers might not agree with Hussan’s ideology, but they will understand how he got there when he says:
[Your father] realized the truth; the truth that killing Jews was pointless, regardless of how good it made some of our countrymen feel. Hitler learned this the hard way. To truly bring the Muslim faith back to prominence, the entire animal of the West would have to be slaughtered, not just the Jewish parasite invading it.
But an “Agent of Influence”—someone whose political actions and arguments are alleged to serve the interests of a foreign power—can be used wittingly or unwittingly, cooperatively or not, to influence politics and history, and very few in this engrossing novel ever know the full story or the true stakes of the world events they’re messing around in.
Hamilton’s prose is mostly quick and clean, and if he has a tendency to drop in bits of Middle East history in rather large chunks, at least they’re interesting and probably new to most readers. The settings are exotic; the characters serious.
A native of Louisville, Kentucky, Hamilton holds a business degree and has worked mostly in the financial industry. His favorite reading material is espionage and world history, particularly twentieth-century nonfiction. With sixteen years invested in the reading of real-life espionage stories and historical non-fiction of the twentieth century, Hamilton might as well have a PhD. in thrills. This is one roller coaster ride readers won’t want to get off.
Holly Chase Williams
Agent of Influence
Author: Russell Hamilton
Rating: Very Good!
Publisher: iUniverse
Web Page: iuniverse.com
Agent of Influence is subtitled "A Thriller" and the book lives up to the hype. Russell Hamilton has written as tightly plotted an international spy story as you are going to find in this genre. And genre it is with the usual gimmicks--exotic locations, beautiful women, terrifying terrorists--only, surprisingly, the clichés are so well incorporated into the action that each twist opens up--well, a new twist. You know what's going on, but not exactly what's going on.
Another happy surprise is that the CIA is really the "good guys" and the terrorists are truly insidious, as patient as they are clever, and now they have their agent of influence in a position to destroy the USA once and for all. Alex Bryce, a fumbling new CIA recruit, plays counterpoint to brilliant and beautiful Anna Starks, a field agent extraordinaire. By injecting the bumbling Bryce and a number of equally inept heavies into the cast of professional agents (and the agents on both sides seem pretty bumbling themselves at times) Hamilton is able to throw enough confusion into the terrorists' carefully timed sequence of events to bring success or failure down to the very last moment.
If the characters and dialogue are somewhat stilted at times, this is offset by Hamilton's easy familiarity with places. He seems as comfortable writing about Cairo as Lexington, Kentucky and there is a great scene from the 1973 Secretariat win at the Derby that is worth the price of admission.
BONUS: If you are into Muslim conspiracy theories, this is a particularly timely book.
