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Kirk McGarvey is the interim director for the CIA. The President has nominated him to be the Director and McGarvey now has to be confirmed by the Senate. Two Senate members are making it very hard on McGarvey - but that is the least of his problems. Something bad is coming. McGarvey feels it in his bones. McGarvey's wife, Katy, feels something bad is coming too. So does his good friend and computer genius, Otto Rencke. Even Dick Yemm, McGarvey's bodyguard and limousine driver, feels it. McGarvey's daughter Elizabeth and her husband, feel it as well. Everyone knows something evil is coming. The reader is told about it all throughout the 380 pages of THE KILL ZONE. Okay already, so tell us what is going on! Someone is trying to kill McGarvey and his family but who, why, when, where, and how? To tell you the truth, by the time I got to page 100 I didn't much care. Both his wife and daughter are spoiled women who feel that they have everything coming to them. The fact that McGarvey even admits to this doesn't take away the loathing I felt for these two characters. I didn't care what happened to them. THE KILLING ZONE is all about the Cold War and how it is affecting McGarvey's life in the post 9/11 era. The reader is given lots of information about what happened to McGarvey when he was a spy for the CIA some twenty years earlier. Seems that years ago, he ran from his wife when she asked him to choose between her and the CIA. He chose the CIA and they divorced only to remarry twenty years later. They would have been better off staying divorced in my opinion. The book starts out in Russia, with the murder of a ninty-something year old spy. When a second ninty-five year old Soviet spy finds the first spy dead, he runs from Russia to France with some highly classified information - where yet another 90 year old Russian spy is murdered. Dead old Russian spies all over the place. Somehow all these old Russian spies have something to do with McGarvey becoming the Director of the CIA. I didn't much care for THE KILLING ZONE. There's a lot of information about the Cold War and everything that McGarvey did then, including the people that he killed. The storyline involving his family left me, ummm, cold. If the author had just left his family out and simply focused on McGarvey, I might have enjoyed this book. All his angst and guilt and moaning about his daughter and wife simply annoyed me to no end. The ending was exceedingly sudden. For over 300 pages we're shown a lot of McGarvey's personal life and the readers are given a ton of information about his past. Then, author David Hagberg wraps the whole story in the last 40 pages or so, in a very strange and contrived, neat package. Too neat, too strange, too unlikely. If you like spy novels you might like this one. But if you aren't a fan of the genre I'd suggest you skip this novel go on to read another book.
Reviewed by Sharon Katz, December 2002
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Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)
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