Red Alert

Another of the excellent UNACO series, written by Alastair MacNeill, based on the outlines for films (never filmed as far as I know) by Alastair MacLean.  If it sounds like a somewhat improbable provenance, especially as Alastair MacNeill hasn't written anything outside this series, I gotta confess I felt the same until I started reading the series.

It's excellent.  Great characters, particularly Sabrina and Mike.  And yes, this is a thriller where there's a male and female character who don't fall hopelessly in love, and Sabrina is actually pretty independent and a great character in her own right!  Amazing.  And the plot is fantastic, lots of nice twists and turns, action, excitement.  I reckon this is one of my favourites from the series.  The Red Brigades in Italy have got hold of a deadly virus in a raid on a plant.  They call it 'sleeping gas', and there's a power struggle amongst the leadership, meaning that nobody actually seems to know where the virus is--including the leaders of the Red Brigades, who decide to work alongside the police in order to get the virus back from the rogue cell.  But all is not as it seems.  Need I say more?  All the excitement and plot twists you'd expect from an Alastair MacLean, but the characters are slightly more developed in this series and I thoroughly enjoyed it.

Death Train

Based on a film script by Alastair MacLean, this is a fantastic book. Although you can kinda tell it's not an Alastair MacLean, cos one of the main characters is female *shocked gasp!*. And she's not just a pretty face, a damsel in distress, a femme fatale, or any of those cliches that you tend to find in older thrillers. She's got a brain, she uses it, and she's an integral part of UNACO. The United Nations Anti-Crime Organisation becomes aware that six kegs of plutonium, one damaged, are being shipped around Europe. A fascinating hunt ensues. All the drama you'd expect from an Alastair MacLean, but with even more interesting and well-developed characters than usual. Plenty of twists, plenty of action, plenty of intrigue. Kinda seems mean that Alastair MacNeill didn't get to put his name a bit bigger on the cover, given that he was the person who actually [I]wrote[/I] it, but there you go. I couldn't put it down, a great book that I highly recommend.