Publisher's Weekly Review
This second thriller by the author of Never Look Back has lots of potential but never manages to catch fire. The book opens crisply with the murder of a CIA agent in Germany who has passed information about a mole in the FBI to a courier, a woman agent who must evade capture. The plot turns sluggish when it shifts to Seattle where a middle-level FBI man becomes a pawn in a ruse to gain sensitive military secrets. Innocently caught in the intrigue is Jay Becker, a rock musician and sailor, who is hired to teach a young German woman how to handle a boat. Becker falls for the woman, an electronics expert, who, he learns, is being used by the spy ring to assess the material being received. The book is best when the author crosscuts back to Europe and the CIA courier's escape with the information, but the bulk of the action is padded, slowing the narrative pace. (August 1) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Kirkus Review
Pearson learned a lesson from the warm reception of his slam-bang first thriller, Never Look Back (1985), and he doesn't look back for a second as he throws another steaming succession of thrills into his new bloodboiler. The albatross of the title is Iben Hoist, a Soviet spy whose code name is taken from The Rime of the Ancient Mariner; in this plot, the blood of the albatross brings bad luck to nearly all concerned. Deceptively, the novel begins in Regensburg, West Germany, as CIA agent Sharon Johnson shares a hotel dinner with a tuxedo-clad agent whose cover is blown and who dies before her eyes, poisoned and clutching a photograph. On the run, Sharon finds herself stabbing and shooting pursuers while topless in pantyhose (a charmingly erotic scene), once even knifing a policeman by error. Soon, she's off to Seattle, hoping to help uncover ""Wilhelm,"" the mastermind of a Soviet ring stealing CIA technology. Wilhelm has moved to Seattle and is looking for an agent to corrupt. The reader is led into a rerun of The Spy Who Came in From the Cold as recovering alcoholic agent Roy Kapella is chosen to be a stalking horse for Wilhelm: Kapella must simulate going back on the bottle, must lose a lot of money at gambling, and must ""decay"" into the perfect agent for Iben Holst to turn for Wilhelm. Hoist falls in with Kapella, who is $11,000 in hock to a Chinese gambling boss, lends him money, then leads him into a blind alley of unrepayable debt. Meanwhile, Hoist's companion Marlene is living on a yacht in Puget Sound and hires young musician sailor Jay Becker to teach her how to handle her boat and possibly to win an upcoming yacht race. Slowly Becker sinks into the bottomless slot between the spy worlds, falls for Marlene and eventually finds himself killing Soviet heavies left and right to save her. Like a kaleidoscope, the colorful story shifts focus constantly, without much need to make sense until the final pages fall into place. An alternative escape to a night with the tube. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
In Seattle, the ordinary life of Jay Becker (part-time sailor, bicyclist, and musician) is shattered by violence and international intrigue as he becomes involved with a mysterious German woman to whom he is giving sailing lessons. When Roy Kepella (an alcoholic Seattle-based CIA agent) participates in an internal sting operation by stealing top secret data, Becker is only one of the many players drawn into the vortex of Kepella's staged downward spiralleaving Kepella to wonder who is friend, who is foe. Meanwhile, the CIA ``mule'' with information vital to the Seattle operation is trying to evade enemy agents in Europe in an attempt to reach the U.S. Pearson skillfully spins this thriller with sense-of-place, breakneck pace, and economically drawn, believable characters. V. Louise Saylor, Eastern Washington Univ. Lib., Cheney (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
