Patrick Robinson’s latest international thriller, “Power Play,” is a fun read, once it gets going. And there’s the rub. You need to hang in there through several hundred pages of set-up exposition—establishing the political climate of 2018, air strikes by the Israeli Air Force aided by US technology that destroyed Iran’s nuclear capabilities, submarine reconnaissance in the North Atlantic, and past embarrassments suffered by the Soviet Union that turned the latest Soviet Premier into a vengeful Khrushchev-wannabe who orders a secret missile strike against the US.
For anybody who remembers the Cuban Missile Crisis, the details will take you backwards and forwards simultaneously, which is a good trick for a writer. But if the inner power struggles of the Russian Navy and its US counterpart don’t grab you, the story may seem to suffer from a dearth of action.
There’s an exciting exchange in the prologue between a Mossad agent and a Russian Navy Commander-turned spy. But the Russian gets killed several chapters in and the Mossad agent serves only the set-up. Aside from a Russian submarine dragging a Scottish fishing trawler to the bottom of the North Atlantic in the first chapter, thereby alerting the US Navy and sparking the central plot, the main action and crisis jump off about forty pages from the end. That’s when Seal’s Delta Team 10 finally gets in gear. Sure, the details of their preparation are fun. After all, how are they going to intercept a ten-thousand ton Russian tanker carrying nuclear missiles, retrieve the warheads, sink it with all hands and, in order to avoid WWIII, do it so invisibly and completely that the rest of the world will never know it happened?
Robinson’s forte is his wealth of knowledge and creating exposition that sets up a complicated yet believable crisis. The dialogue, though, is generic from one character to another, and even the names blur, like Seal Captain Mack Bedford, and Navy Admiral Mark Bradfield. Still, it’s a fun read on cold winter nights.