Review: MP-5 minus
Rating: 3 out of 5
Date: 08 24, 2012
At the outset, I must say that Mr. Sargent has created a series that is worth following.  Starting with the fineSeven Days From Sunday (An MP-5 CIA Thriller, Book 1), he introduced us to a team of highly capable operatives who are on the front line of counter-terrorism.  Unfortunately, in "Alliance of Evil" he has divided his focus between that team and a pair of brothers who, while living in the US, have lost both their hatred for the Great Satan and their willingness to blow themselves up.  The action takes place in the several locations in the US that are targets for suicide bomb attacks, and in Mexico, where the MP-5 team is stalking the mastermind of those attacks.  The connection between the two stories certainly exists, but is not especially tight, and the back-and-forth between them does not make for the best possible presentation, in my view.The story of the brothers is worth telling, though readers will surely vary in their degree of sympathy for them, and gives a somewhat different angle to the usual terrorism plot.  However, that results in about fifty percent of the book that is not devoted to the MP-5 characters.  Not really what I bargained for.  And to deepen the same problem, much of the story in Mexico focuses on a new character who is connected to the hosts of the terrorist leaders.Although Mr. Sargent has woven a complex plot with his usual cast of interesting characters, the pursuit of the terrorist leaders in Mexico came across as a contrived sideshow to cover the inexplicable failure to obtain the same results from the many suicide bombers already in the US.