Less Than

Matthew Quirk's 2019 novel, The Night Agent, was his first standalone outing and offered an interesting hero in an intriguing situation. His second, 2020's The Hour of the Assassin, is...less good.

Nick Averose is a security consultant retired from the United States Secret Service. One of the things his company does is test out security measures by trying to thwart them, and the book opens with him doing just that for the firm employed by a former CIA director. He breaches the security, "tags" the director and all seems well, except that as soon as he's finished the director's house is truly breached by some bad guys who leave him dead and a mountain of evidence pointing to Nick. Nick then goes on the run in order to clear his name and find out whose behind setting him up and killing the former spy chief. Unfortunately, since the target was a former spy chief, the list of suspects is long and the trail of the truth will lead to some of the most powerful and ruthless people in Washington.

Assassin is a quilt of bits of other spy thriller novels stitched together with thin characters, clumsy plotting and infodump editorializing on the "way Washington really works." The narrative engine is driven by scenarios seen in dozens of other stories and not really retooled for the story at hand. The central plot is a worn re-tread easily seen coming as soon as its principals are introduced. There is only one real unpredictable twist and it proves ultimately meaningless to the novel's resolution. Nearly every character has either a speech or internal monologue about the aforementioned "way Washington really works" and the ending set piece has Nick trying to save not one but three damsels in distress.  Even though Nick's found his home, computer and business compromised, he still heads right towards his young female hacker employee in order to learn answers, putting her in danger. And though these shadowy operatives have shown they can get into his home and everywhere else, he doesn't even act like his wife Karen's cell phone might be bugged. That's not the only phone goof; at one point Nick takes a call from Karen on a cell phone he left behind at a house from which he escaped several pages earlier.

In an interview at The Real Book Spy, Quirk said he initially had a more complicated plot for Assassin and rewrote it extensively based on editorial advice. So it's up in the air as to whether Quirk or the publisher wanted a barely-veiled commentary on 2018's Brett Kavanaugh situation. Whoever it was got his or her wish, but they sure didn't get much of a book to read.

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Sondra Marshak and Myrna Culbreath played large roles in the initial stages of officially published Star Trek fiction. Together they edited both New Voyages collections (one of which contained one of their stories) and they produced four of the first dozen or so novels, among the few authors who put out work in both the initial Bantam Books and the later Pocket Books groups. They were prominent members of the initial fan communities that began to produce the first fan conventions.

And they offer solid proof that bad Star Trek fiction wasn't limited to the later glut years, as all four of their books have a text-to-subtext ratio that resembles an iceberg and depend heavily on characters who may share names with those we saw on the screen but resemble them little otherwise. It's hard to say which of their four books is the least successful, but 1982's  The Prometheus Design makes a strong case for itself out of the four.

A rising tide of senseless violence seems to be gripping the known galaxy, with formerly peaceful people and stable diplomatic relationships deteriorating across the Federation. The Enterprise is investigating the way these phenomena have been seen on the planet Helvan but the survey team itself falls victim. James Kirk is separated from the team and only recovered after being exposed as an alien by the Helvans; his recovery is incomplete as he has significant memory loss that leads to irrational outbursts. Starfleet Admiral Savaj boards the Enterprise to examine the situation and continue the mission, and he demotes Kirk in order to replace him with Spock as captain. Spock tries to deal with the deteriorating situation by invoking "Vulcan code of command," a codicil that Vulcans demanded in return for Starfleet participation. A Vulcan who invokes this code demands instant and unquestioning obedience to every order given. A later return to Helvan with both Spock and Savaj as part of a survey team puts them in danger as the truth behind the mystery and its actors is finally revealed.

As with all Marshak-Culbreath Trek stories, the key plot point turns on weakening, even feminizing Kirk in the face of the true alpha male of the crew, Spock. At one point Kirk is even something of a prize fought over by the two Vulcans, who have been mysteriously enlarged by the antagonists so that the Marshak and Culbreath Kirk is even smaller and weaker than usual compared to Spock. The "Vulcan code of command" device is, no pun intended, illogical and the pair's vision of what Vulcans are like is never seen again in the history of Trek fiction.

Prometheus winds up in a tangle of discussions and monologues meant to either obliquely or directly explore ideas that the two authors consider important, such as objectivism, libertarian philosophy, sociobiology and genetic determinism. It's pretty heady stuff for a show that once had its lead fight a man in a lizard suit amongst a set of papier-mâché rocks, and it is done with little effort at making it a vital part of the narrative. Marshak and Culbreath may have had something to say, and it might even have been something worth saying and good to hear -- but it's been stuck in such a lumpy, clumsy and bizarre novel that it never gets the chance to be properly introduced and judged on its own merits.