The Fighting Agents

Griffin writes a strong tale, with characters you like and care about--lots of them. This book has two basic plot lines, each on a different part of the globe. Author brings both home in the end. While the reader must pay attention to which plot line, the stories are believable and fun. I keep wondering when Joe Kennedy is to be killed off???

This deserves three and a half stars. It was, plotwise, a vast improvement over the first couple books. As one would expect, there is espionage and things don't always go smoothly, which makes for a much more interesting read. Another pleasant break from schoolwork. Sooner or later I'll get around to tracking down book 5 and continue on.

I like these better than the "honor" series because there is at least some action in these. Sorta makes me was to drop Para and join SOE.

Set laregly in the Phillippine Islands in 1943, this is one of the best military thrillers I've read. Griffin's grasp of WWII history seems to me, admittedly not a professional historian, particularly sharp--he seems to be able to stitch a story to every real event that happened anywhere in the world during his story's extent.As is usual with Griffin's books, several storylines that don't seem related are made into a tight braid by the end of the book, and characters whose purpose was obscure are suddenly revealed to be central to the *actual* story that these perspectives unite to tell. What in tarnation could a loser in Cairo recruited by the CIA's precursor and a crack agent in Budapest, whose job is to prevent Nazi interrogators from torturing information out of prisoners he knows even if it means killing them himself, have to do with a -- well, unconventional, let's say -- guerrilla commander in the Phillippines? Telling would be spoilering. Read it and find out. Griffin, a talented writer of some eighty summers (b. 1929), is still writing! Give his stuff a try. Even the military-fiction-phobic could find a thriller or two to enjoy.