Move over Tom Clancy and Richard Marcinko. I have discovered a writer, Tom Grace, with a body of work going back to the late 1990’s.
Thanks to Author Magazine, an online e-magazine service of the Pacific Northwest Writers Association, I saw an interview with Tom Grace and it intrigued me enough to find his website. There I found that he had several spythrillers that have been published over the last decade.
I ordered 4 of his first 5 novels from www.powells.com. Yesterday, I finished the first of his series featuring Nolan Kilkenny, a red haired ex-Navy Seal. The book is Spyder Web.
The thrust of the story deals with computer technology and industrial espionage on an international stage. Haiti/Dominican Republic, Hong Kong, several U.S. locations and England provide the settings.
Kilkenny retires from the Navy after an initial SEAL adventure and returns home to Michigan to work for his father at an innovative computer network on the campus of the University of Michigan.
There he meets his long time friend, Kelsey Newton, who is a pretty blonde with whom he has been friends from childhood. Eventually a romance breaks out of this friendship.
Both Kelsey and Nolan are computer geniuses working on a really secret computer project that the bad guys are trying to steal. An interesting sidelight to the story is the fact that the story was written in the late 1990’s so much of the technology is out of date by today’s standards. It shows how far we have come in a decade.
The story is a quick read despite being about 400 pages. I have now started book 2 in the series. More to come.