That conversation itself prompts him to take his own trip to the area and see if he can learn anything and rescue the four young people now known to have been kidnapped for ransom. But the charity head seems a little hard to pin down, and the events themselves don't smell quite right to Wells. And when he learns he will be dealing with a Somali warlord, he realizes few of the connections and little of the experience he has in the Afghan mountain country will help him in the no-man's-land of the Kenya-Somalia border.
Berenson has obviously done his research for Night Ranger, highlighting how many of the power players in the essentially lawless countries where these charities operate often use them for their own ends. Although he's taken Wells out of his war on terror milieu, he's given him some new reasons to push himself, in order to help his son's friend and possibly begin to rebuild their relationship. But Ranger seems like a sewn-together patchwork of incomplete parts -- there's no real resolution to the situation involving the charity director, and although Berenson starts to explore how the crisis has a toughening effect on a previously shallow young woman he only dabbles in it and never fleshes it out, either. Making John Wells a little less of a weapon in the war against terrorists and a little more soldier of fortune is probably a good broadening step for the series, but Berenson will need to tighten his storytelling focus and finish out his narrative elements in order to make that move successful.
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Rachel's father is riding a wave of political popularity based on his opposition to the money-wasting NASA (he at one point promises to cut the agency's budget in half and give the remainder to the Department of Education), and the incumbent president wants her to help him brief his staff on the meteorite discovery before the president himself and NASA staff announce it to the world. But not everything is as it seems (the novel is called Deception Point, after all), and Rachel soon finds herself on the run with celebrity oceanographer Michael Tolland, fleeing people who have a secret to keep and few scruples about how they will do so.
It's very silly, gets probably dozens of things wrong (NASA's budget, for example, in fiscal year 2000 when the story is set, was just more than 13 billion dollars. The Department of Education's was three times that amount) and is written in Brown's usual hammer-handed style. But for all of that, Deception Point lacks some of the crusading that Brown has tended to do ever since The Da Vinci Code and it makes this book a lot less of a drudge to get through. Oh, Brown has A Cause, but it's the need to privatize space research instead of rewrite Christian history. Or maybe it's the need to make sure the government holds on to NASA because otherwise the only work done in space will be that which makes profits for corporations. Who knows? Brown doesn't, but since his research on the subject would get laughed out of a middle school term paper, it doesn't much matter. Deception Point gets an average grade on suspense, an average grade on its action set pieces, an average grade on its writing and style (we're grading on a curve, setting it against other bestselling thrillers), so even the fail it earns on a big chunk of its "facts" mean it can pass the term.
Since the next term was in fact The Da Vinci Code, it's safe to say we're not seeing the GPA head upward any time soon.
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