The Venetian Judgment

 

David Stone is the cover name for a man born into a military family with a history of combat service "going back to Waterloo." He's also a retired military officer himself who has worked with federal intelligence agencies and state-level law enforcement units in North America, Central America, and Southeast Asia. (His publisher, Penguin, has an interview with the author on their site, one of the few you'll find available).

Stone's first thriller, The Echelon Vendetta, introduced the character of Micah Dalton, a CIA "cleaner," the guy who erases a mess after something goes wrong in the field. In Venetian Judgment, Stone's and Dalton's third outing, the questionably sane Dalton (in the first book, he's visited by the ghost of a dead colleague with whom he holds long conversations), just about goes over the deep end when he starts assassinating members of the Serbian gang who shot his lover, in what is basically a suicide run.

But thanks to a mysterious jade box containing a stainless steel glasscutter which arrives at his villa, Dalton instead becomes involved in the search for a high-level traitor in the CIA thought to be responsible for the murder of elderly Mildred Durant, an adviser to an NSA decryption team known as the Glass Cutters. Dalton learns that not only did Durant work on the Venona Project which involved interception of Soviet cable traffic during the cold war, it appears Stalin had a source close to Roosevelt who was never exposed.

The hunt for answers leads Durant and his associate, a half-America, half-English aristocrat named Mandy Pownall, into airborne firefights above the Sea of Marmora, a sea chase up the Straits of the Bosphorus, and even to a violent confrontation in the mangrove swamps that line Florida’s Emerald Coast as they attempt to stop a group of spies before they paralyze America's most critical intelligence operations.

Stone's books are not for the squeamish, mixing in often explicit violence (not as much in Venetian Judgment as was the case with Echelon Vendetta), but the intricately-plotted spy thrillers with layers of insider details take readers on a Bondian thrill-ride around the world in a style some have compared to Robert Ludlum, with its similar themes of one crusading man up against a host of conspiracy theories.

Since Stone zealously maintains his cover, you'll never see him at booksignings or conferences. The best way to get a signed copy of his books is via VJ Books.