I just finished Once A Spy by Keith Thomson. The spy/thriller is the story of a 30 year old deadbeat gambling addict son who finds out that his Alzheimer-suffering father was one of the CIA's most legendary spies. When Drummond is targeted by a shadowy group in the CIA (are they the good guys? the bad guys? are they really CIA?) who wants him dead because they fear that he may blurt out secrets that would do untold damage, Charlie and Drummond go on the run.
Charlie nonchalantly takes this all in stride. After all, Charlie is already being hunted by the Russian Mafia for an unpaid gambling debt, so it's not much of a step to being targeted by professional assassins that aren't very good at their job if a civilian and a senior citizen with Alzheimer's can elude them quite easily. Even when something HUGE happens, Charlie sort of just shrugs it off.
As for Drummond, he goes in and out of lucid moments and it's hard to tell if he is faking his alzheimer's disease in order to fool the enemy.
The novel is darkly humorous. Thomson has fun playing with the conventions of the spy/thriller genre. But with the setup offered here, the story should have stayed within the land of the believable. Instead, we quickly go to the improbable with plot twists and gadgets straight out of the worst James Bond films (such as a Dr. Mengele-like torturer, the villain's secret island compound, underground secret laboratories, a sinister washing machine, and a nursing home for retired spies).
The relationship between Chalie and Drummond is what holds the story together. It is bittersweet because as we see Charlie get closer and closer to his father, we also see Drummond retreating farther and farther into his disease. There's also a half-hearted attempt at a romantic storyline between Charlie and an NSA spy that doesn't really gel.
Overall, it was a fun story while I was reading it. But trying to mix a poignant father/son story against an improbable spy/thriller filled with mobsters, double agents, and complex fight scenes, just doesn't work.
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