Review: A page-turner
Rating: 5 out of 5
Date: 05 7, 2011
Implant, Kindle edition by Jeffrey Anderson and Michael Wallace is a fast moving, action-filled thriller that shuttles mostly between Washington, D. C. and environs and Africa.The CIA has a new device they can implant within the body of an operative with which he can acquire data anywhere in the world, without detection, and can be downloaded to their home intelligence sectors. The story follows two of the operatives who have the implants performed by a brilliant young woman surgeon.  Both are Americans, but one was the son of a white South African militant racist and the other of a black U. S. Army major. The two, however, are long-standing friends from school and several years in combat as former Green Berets. The two are sent to the African state of Namibia, a democracy where a huge oil deposit has been found and is being developed by China.Several levels of CIA operatives, including the Director, are introduced along with an egotistical computer geek who adds, without anyone's knowledge, his own little quirks to the implants. These additions, along with further manipulations by the geek, cause havoc in the assignment that sets a series of intertwining plots into action. These plots involve all of the individuals already present along with the surgeon's husband, some of his prominent Wall Street acquaintances, the director of the Chinese operation in Namibia, his contract guards and prominent members of the African country's government.The plots, and their development, result from today's growing amount of information about the rising interest in the shift of oil geopolitics to Africa, the position of increasing importance played by China in the world, the human appetite for money and position, and the ever-present existence by Americans of distrust of the CIA and its activities.Implant is a most enjoyable page-turner that, unfortunately, could have had a better job of proofing, but moves along so well that these errors did not interfere with this reader's overall enjoyment.