Gregg Loomis Gates of Hades

Gates of Hades

Gregg Loomis

Leisure, June 2007, $7.99, 368 pp.

ISBN: 0843958944

When Jason Peters' beloved wife died in the pentagon on 9/11, the Delta Force operative swore vengeance on all terrorists. He left the service to work for Narcom, an independent firm whose main client is the U.S. government. Narcom gives the government plausible deniability in a mission impossible scenario. His latest assignment is to kidnap arms dealer Aziz Saud Alazar and turn him over to the U.S. Navy who will rendition him to a country where torture is part of the interrogation process.

The target dies but Jason gets his computer and hands it over to the CIA. A month later he is called to Washington to meet his boss in person but before he leaves his caribean island, thugs come to kill him; he survives but his house is blown up. In Washington he learns that information taken from Aziz's machine indicates he sold a new kind of weapon to Ecco, called the Breath of Earth run by environment fanatic and criminal Boris Eglov, who lost his family in the Chernobyl meltdown. With the help of volcanologist Dr. Maria Bergenghetti, Jason travels all over Italy to find out what the bio weapon is and what the terrorists plan to do with it and falling in love with his reluctant companion while dodging enemy agents and the Italian authorities.

Readers who love to ride a roller coaster work of suspense will thoroughly enjoy GATES OF HADES. Borrowing elements from an action adrenaline thriller, history and archeology, Gregg Loomis creates a work that is so exciting and filled with enough twists and turns to keep the reader off balance and totally immersed in the upbeat plot. Unlike most thriller writers, Mr. Loomis fully develops his characters so that readers feel connected to them and want to know what happens to them.

Harriet Klausner