cover image Vengeance Is Mine: 
An Ian Wallace Novel

Vengeance Is Mine: An Ian Wallace Novel

Douglas MacKinnon. S&S/Threshold, $25 (288p) ISBN 978-1-4516-4097-7

MacKinnon, the author of the memoir Rolling Pennies in the Dark, makes his fiction debut with a thriller that plays off the controversy over traditional values in today’s political landscape. Boston PI Ian Wallace, a former CIA operative who quit after he was captured and tortured while on assignment in Moscow, takes a case from his former employer: protecting a Russian defector, now a top Pentagon computer expert, whom the Russians are trying to kidnap. Wallace leaps at the job for three reasons: it pays $40,000; it comes with the assistance of a shapely CIA handler, the flirtatious Kathy Donahue; and it targets the Russians’ main headhunter, Vladimir Ivanchenko, who happens to be the thug who tortured Wallace years earlier in a dank prison cell. Wallace’s musings about politics and his personal observations about life will resonate with conservative readers, but even they might wish the author had tried harder to provide a credible, suspenseful plot. Agent: Frank Breeden, Premiere Literary Agency. (May)