Review: "Cloudburt," An Action Packed Thriller That'll Keep You Reading!
Rating: 4 out of 5
Date: 07 29, 2012
In "Cloudburst," Ryne Douglas Pearson brings back FBI agent Art Jefferson in another adventure.  He sets the hook quickly in Chapter 1; the president is killed in Los Angeles in a brazen terrorist suicide attack.  Meanwhile, halfway across the globe, an American 747 airliner is hijacked by another group of Middle Eastern extremists and forced to make a brief stop in Libya, where a strange, heavy cargo is loaded onto the aircraft. Events that are first seen as unconnected soon are proven to be part of an interconnected plan to strike at the heart of the United States.We soon begin to suspect that the plane is carrying more than luggage; it is carrying an extremely deadly thermonuclear device that the terrorists plan to deliver to the United States.  Meanwhile, we follow various FBI, Secret Service, and CIA teams as they try to fill in backgrounds on the terrorists, and we later join an antiterrorist military team who is out to attempt to save the plane and its passengers.  However, as it becomes more apparent that the item on the plane is actually a thermonuclear device, additional subplots quickly develop. The story continues to jump all over the globe as an enormous force is mobilized to save the plane, and if they can't, then to blow the passenger-laden 747 out of the air before it reaches US airspace.FBI agent Art Jefferson, Delta Force captain Sean Graber, pilot Bart Hendrickson, and others are fully developed and well characterized.  Pearson's skill as a screen writer is evident as the dialogue moved crisply and logically even as he shifted the setting from subplot to subplot.  From the very beginning to the end, the story was suspenseful and filled with precise descriptions of weaponry and military situations; it was very detailed at times, but again, it was interesting and easy to assimilate. The one real weakness that I could not quite understand was the author's use of an older, somewhat obsolete fighter jet which was armed with some kind of nuclear missile. This plane was sent to shadow the hijacked plane and, if needed, shoot it down before it could enter US airspace. It made no sense to me why one would use an older plane and a nuclear device to shoot down an aircraft carrying a thermonuclear device; it seems that there were various forms of modern technology that could have been used instead of this "old jet fighter."  I struggled with a 3 or a 4 for "Cloudburst;" I finally gave it a "4" - there is no question that this is an action-packed, techno-thriller with an enjoyable fast-paced plot.