Agent Zero - Jack Mars
| I don’t review a lot of books these days, although I still power through about three books a week. Every once in a while, though, I get the urge to spit out a few hundred words to share my opinion of some thing I’ve just finished. Sometimes it’s because the book is so good – Peter Heller’s The Dog Stars or Alexandra Oliva’s The Last One come to mind. On the other hand. Some books are just plain lousy, and I get a kick out of lambasting them. There’s the third option, too: the book’s neither great not execrable, but… something about it tells me to sit down and write. That’s what happened with Agent Zero, the first book in a series by some guy who uses the pseudonym Jack Mars. |  |
If you’ve seen the first entry in the Jason Bourne canon, you already know the plot: dude gets in a tight spot and blasts his way out of it via muscle memory, slowly coming to the realization that he’s some sort of superspy. You know the type: master of every known martial art and weapon, a killing machine with a 50-BPM resting heart rate who never seems to practice anything related to his skillset.
In the case of Reid Lawson, however, things are a little different: somebody had stuck a “memory-suppression ship” in his skull and wiped out his entire memory of being the super-agent Kent Steele. And here the guy had thought he was merely a widowed Classics prof with two teenaged daughters…
Lawson/Steele, of course, quickly learns that he’s up against a shadowy cabal that intends to take over the world, a sort of “international deep state” if you will. Naturally, he has to fight every one of them to a standstill more or less with his bare hands. It’s a darned good thing he’s Agent Zero…
The fact that the whole super-agent thing has been pretty much done to death over the past few decades notwithstanding, Agent Zero chapped this particular reviewer’s hiney for a number of other reasons. In the first place, it’s supposed to be an espionage thriller, not a scifi novel; so that whole “memory-suppression chip” plot had clearly been shoehorned in like that stupid Experian Boost Cow into a dog show. I’m more or less OK with willing suspension of disbelief when Jack Reacher or James Bond is tearing the villain a new one, but asking me to believe that the CIA has that kind of technology floating around is a little much.
As for the rest of the novel, it’s pretty much standard fare; including the requisite betrayal, the gorgeous femme fatale, the highly-placed turncoat in the agency, and the assassin who is almost – but not quite – the equal of the hero. Either Mars was on autopilot writing it or I was on autopilot while reading it.
And speaking of Mars and writing, I think the main reason why I wanted to write this review was that the guy REALLY could have used an editor with basic knowledge of something besides house style. Take, for instance, Jack’s insistence of writing that blood “eked from” a nose or wound. “Eked?” Don’t you mean “leaked”? and then there’s Mars’ misconception about what the sternum is, at one point writing that Kent Steele had sliced the assassin’s “sternum” open. Ummm, Jack? The sternum is a bone…
While we’re at it, shouldn’t someone writing about Iranian terrorists know that they don’t speak Arabic, they speak Farsi? And that the two aren’t the same thing at all? I’m sure that if you read through the reviews at the river, you’ll also find someone who’s called out Mars on how he wrote about firearms, too.
The upshot? Agent Zero is just a somewhat derivative thriller with a brief sideways dash into scifi and recurring errors in word usage. Without the extra irritants, I’d have only called it “average;” with them it doesn’t quite make it to three stars.
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