2 out of 4 stars
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Power Corrupts by Nigel Ruddin is an action-packed secret service novel. Commander David Oliver Grant and his team are alerted to an imminent and massive cybercrime to be committed by the megalomaniac, Muhammad Muhiuddin Aurangzeb (Alamgir, Seizer Of The Universe to his friends). Aurangzeb plans to make himself the ruler of India and to impose the Moslem faith on it. To achieve this, he is financed by the unwitting Temple of Unity, a new religion in India, and partnered by Thomas Starski, the nefarious CEO of Global Custodians.
I would have liked a little more guidance as to who the target audience for this book is as I now feel that I wasn’t the best person to review it. I selected it on the basis of having read the first chapter, summarised as follows. Commander Grant swam across the hotel pool and was attacked by the mosaic octopus which came to life. ‘Quite scary’, he thought. He then realised he’d been poisoned with LSD and remembered bumping into a man with a foot-long nose. He eventually got back to his room to find that his sidekick, Dexter, had tipped his would-be assassin down the laundry shaft, so Grant told him that he could have the homeward journey air miles.
I thought it was a hilarious opening chapter and was all set for a Batmanesque romp à la Adam West. In fact, it wasn’t a romp. Though the book doesn’t take itself seriously, it was more in the style of a graphic novel adventure with all the machismo that goes with that kind of story.
I found the immature behaviour of Dexter and Tristan, the weapons expert, grating rather than entertaining. I also found their dismissive attitude to collateral damage to be quite off-putting. When one of their own allies, an Italian opera singer, is shot and killed, Tristan callously asks ’was he in a gondola?’ At one point in the story, a car bomb is found outside their listening post, so a CIA agent decides to relocate it to the Global Custodians building, thereby killing two members of their staff. Our heroes are delighted with this mischief, but I felt that although the CEO was a very bad man, the possibility that his reception staff were in on the caper was pretty remote.
Although the story was rather Bond-like with its gadgets and larger than life criminal masterminds, I found that some of the situations asked for too much suspension of disbelief. After a twilight invasion of a fortress, where two of their people were killed, they stopped outside and built a funeral pyre for the dead. Astonishingly, nobody in the fortress noticed the blaze, though they did find the ashes the following day.
Another indication of the machismo was the lack of female characters. The CIA and Naval Intelligence don’t appear to hire them. In total, there were two, Natasha Rodin, who is Grant’s love interest, and the Archangel Gabrielle. The Archangels are four siblings who control the Temple of Unity. Michael has overall control, Uriel and Raphael are active in the finance and legal areas, while Gabrielle is petite and healthy.
There were other problems. I counted about 50 grammatical errors including misplaced apostrophes, incorrect words such as horse instead of hoarse, born instead of borne and many others. Even the character names were fluid. Gabrielle was sometimes Gabriel; Tristan was sometimes Triston. Chambers started as John and ended up as Ben.
Where I can’t fault the book is in the research. There were some fascinating snippets of technology and history, for example, the Dridex banking malware Trojan and the Gameover Zeus virus were described. There was an interesting account of the fibre-optic link, FLAG, a 28,000-kilometre-long submarine traffic communications cable connecting the UK, Europe and Japan. Also, the Nika revolt, caused by rival chariot racing teams, in Istanbul in the year 532.
With another round of editing, this would make a good adventure story, preferably aimed at the young adult market. I have rated this book 2 out of 4 stars (fair). It’s certainly not a bad book, but there are too many problems to rate a 3.
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power corrupts
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I'm sorry the rest of it didn't show up to the party.
