Title: Conflux: Threat From the Troika
Author: William Brazzel
Publisher: Balboa Press
ISBN: 978-1504391764
Pages: 306
Genre: Fiction, Action/Adventure
Reviewed by: Susan Brown

Hollywood Book Reviews

Get ready for some fast-paced, action-packed reading in this page-turner that pits a veteran Special Forces officer, now an investigative journalist, against an extremist group hell-bent on destroying the U.S. democracy. And that’s just a summary of the action. The story’s nitty gritty is even more exciting.

Protagonist Sean Carrol, a reporter for the New York International News, is thrust into a drama set in motion by Deutsche Christen, a paramilitary organization with German origins operating in the United States, when it kidnaps his niece and nephew. The leader, Carl Dietrich, insists that Carrol conduct an interview with him before he’ll release the young people. Carrol takes along seasoned photographer Wayne Deeter, as a sidekick support person who also has rigged his camera with a GPS locator.

Secrecy abounds as the blindfolded Carrol and Deeter are taken to the hidden interview spot. Once there, the interview goes off without a hitch, but Dietrich refuses to release the children until Carrol’s article is published. Dietrich continues to string Carrol along after the first article by insisting on a second. Of course, he does not grant the release of the youngsters. Based on the GPS information from Deeter’s camera, a military rescue of the kids is undertaken, only to fail miserably. This motivates Carrol to reach out to his former Special Forces buddies to launch a full-scale rescue of his niece and nephew. This plays out in the last part of the book, which I won’t spoil for you.

Mr. Brazzel’s has a good pace to his writing. There are a number of intriguing plot twists and turns, some red herrings and a few baffling areas of the storyline that just didn’t play out, but all-in-all his strength is his ability to drive the action. We can forgive a few lapses in context because his writing is energetic, engaging and detailed.

Interspersed in this storyline — to stop the radical/extremist group from destroying the U.S.— we are privy to a plethora of details about our intrepid hero and his personal life. He lost his wife to cancer, has a dog that he dotes on, a neighbor he’s interested in, friends and family that come and go and a smattering of nefarious figures who sporadically pop up in his day-to-day activities. There’s a lot going on, but Mr. Brazzel manages to keep us focused on whether or not Carrol will be successful in preventing a global war.

This is one of those books that you won’t want to put down until you get to the end. It’s just right for whiling away an afternoon in a favorite reading spot trying to stay one step ahead of the plot twists.