Train Man

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Flexing his considerable prowess at plotting as well as his ability to generate believable, sympathetic characters, Deutermann (Option Zero) delivers his most accomplished thriller yet. Two plot lines evolve, then converge. One concerns the plight of a military train caught in a perilous race against a mad bomber who's intent on destroying a series of strategic railroad bridges. The other involves the FBI's bureaucratic incompetence. When the crash landing of an air force C-130 carrying four decaying Russian nuclear warheads at Anniston (Ala.) Army Weapons Depot coincides with the terrorist demolition of one of the six major railroad bridges across the Mississippi on the eve of a major cross-country train shipment of lethal chemical weapons containers, a disaster is in the making. Assigned to find the saboteur is career FBI agent Hush Hanson, who suspects the bureau's devious director of setting him up to fail when Carolyn Lang, a beautiful female agent with the reputation of being the director's hatchet person, is assigned to partner with him on the case. As more bridges go down, the plight of the doomsday train intensifies and it becomes ever more obvious that Hanson has been made the fall guy in a scenario fraught with high political stakes. Finally, relieved from duty, Hanson and Lang are left alone to save the day--and to deal with the steamy sexual tension that has arisen between them. Deutermann writes a sinewy, active prose that's well suited to his taut tale. The narrative exudes authority--and the author, in fact, used to be an arms control specialist with the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Intelligent, expertly detailed and highly suspenseful, Deutermann's sixth novel is a speeding entertainment locomotive. Agent, Nick Ellison. Author tour. (Sept.) Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

Another solid performance from Deutermann (Zero Option, 1998, etc.), this time about a train-hating, vengeance-hungry madman and the FBI agents seeking to derail him. At FBI headquarters, they'd begun calling the operation "Trainman," though at first something with "Bridges" in it would have worked as well, because it looked as if bridges were the target. Spanning the Mississippi, there are only six of them, and when two were blown to bits, the police and the FBI leapt to conclusions understandable enough though wrong. But agents Hush Hanson and Carolyn Lang widened their scope—freight trains had also been demolished. And pretty soon the investigators had reasons to desert another early theory: maybe it wasn't just terrorist groups they ought to be looking at. Maybe a single terrorist working alone was their target—someone handy with explosives and with a deep grudge that had festered into obsession. Meanwhile, at an army depot in Alabama, another harrowing problem was shaping up. A military train with a mysterious, potentially deadly, increasingly unstable cargo was heading west, for the Mississippi, for one of the bridges likely to be a terrorist's target. Out in the field, Hanson and Lang have all this heaped on their plates, plus an extra dollop or two from FBI politics. They have enough enemies of their own, highly placed people skilled at the game of backstabbing, to make it difficult to know who to trust—and sometimes even whether they can trust each other. And yet, unmistakably, a feeling seems to be growing between the shy, unsure (in his relationships with women) Hanson and the attractive if somewhat hard-bitten Lang ("Razor-pants" to her detractors).Finally, instead of the bridge it's the climax of the book that explodes, and most satisfactorily. Quality entertainment: the details convince, the people are real, the plot twists legitimate.

From the Publisher

"Reads like a great novel, feels like a great movie...Reminiscent of The Day of the Jackal...An edge-of-your-seat, up-all-night thriller."—Nelson DeMille

"Taut...suspenseful...Deutermann delivers his most accomplished thriller yet...A speeding entertainment locomotive."—Publishers Weekly (starred review)