No Way Out

October 7, 2013
Apparently not intended as a parody, Jacobson's fifth Karen Vail novel (after 2011's Inmate 1277) is as hilarious as it is absurd. FBI profiler Vail is called from an assignment in Spain to Britain to lend her steadfastly provincial talents to the British. What begins as a simple effort to keep academic extremists from destroying a newly discovered manuscript that threatens to topple Shakespeare from his pedestal rapidly transforms into an action-filled and largely unsanctioned counterterrorist effort to capture a notorious merchant of death. Reduced to supporting status to Operational Support Intelligence Group's two-fisted man of action Hector DeSantos, Vail is dragged along in an adventure that will take her and her ally across Britain in pursuit of WMDs that they are convinced their opponent possesses. A profiler inexplicably trapped in a thriller novel, Vail doesn't get many opportunities to showcase the talents the reader is assured she has. Instead, we are treated to the madcap rampage of a counterterrorist named DeSantos, a man convinced that any action he takes, from brutalizing prisoners to assassinating a high-ranking British politician, is justified or at least excused by his goals. The result is a testosterone-filled, plausibility-uninhibited paean to the shadowy agencies working to undermine rule of law in the name of a nebulous and ill-defined security. Agent: Joel Gotler, IPG Literary Agency.