Extraordinary Powers

Extraordinary Powers by Joseph Finder

Found this book in a box in my garage.  I have a lot of books in my garage, and I’m not really sure where a lot of them came from.  Every now and then I pick one up out of curiosity and decide to try it, even if I’m unfamiliar with the book, or the author.  I wasn’t exactly blown away by this one, and am not necessarily in any rush to read more of this author’s work, but I still thought this was a good read overall.

It’s impossible for one to read this book and not be reminded of Robert Ludlum.  If anything, this book was a bit of a “Ludlum Lite”.  That’s not to say this book is inferior to Ludlum, it just seemed to move at a more manageable pace and allow the characters to breathe.  It was also an easier book, I felt, to follow.

Ben Ellison is a successful patent lawyer, who used to be pretty good at his job as an agent in the CIA.  His father in law, in fact, is the Director of the CIA.  Or was.  As the book opens, the director has been killed in an “accident”.  Whenever you’re reading a book about the CIA and someone in power dies in an “accident”, you know something is amiss.  At the funeral, there’s another high level CIA operative there, and he tries to recruit Ben back to do some high level work for the agency.  Ben says “no thanks”, but books have also taught us that once you’re in the CIA, you really never leave.  So Ben is put into action against is will, so to speak.

What kind of action?  Not really worth describing here in that much detail.  Yes, the father-in-law’s mysterious death must be secretly investigated, and there were also a lot of weird dealings with other powerful countries by the director shorty before he died.  So Ellison manages to venture to….let’s see if I can remember…..Rome, Paris, London, Washington, and somewhere in Switzerland.  He uncovers a lot of mystery at the same time as he’s being pursued by foes - some obvious, some not so obvious.  The action is pretty par for the course with nothing too rattling, yet a good story overall.

Strangely, the title of this book is derived from an ‘extraordinary power’ that Ellison inadvertently receives before he begins his adventure.  I won’t reveal what that power is, it’s interesting, but I didn’t really thing it was that necessary.  I felt the story could have been told pretty well without Ben’s mysterious power.  Still, though, it didn’t really ruin anything in the story.

If you like espionage thrillers such as Robert Ludlum penned books, I would recommend this book.  It’s a bit dated - having been written in the early nineties shortly after the collapse of the USSR, which is what a lot of the focus is on, but it was still satisfying overall.