The First Casualty

Loomis’s so-so third Jason Peters thriller (after Hot Ice) finds the ex-Delta warrior working for Narcom, a private company employed by the U.S. government to perform politically sensitive, dangerous black ops work. The owner of Narcom, an obese Haitian woman named Momma, tasks him with thwarting an al-Qaeda attack on the U.S. president, masterminded by Jason’s archenemy, Mahomet Moustaph. The plan is to bring down Air Force One by using a secret death ray supposedly invented by legendary scientist Nicola Tesla. Jason puts together a team and follows a trail of straightforward clues that eventually lead to a mosque in Timbuktu, Mali, where Tesla’s death ray has been set up in a minaret. Readers will find nothing new in the Tesla material, and scattered bits of overwriting (e.g., “The Toyota’s headlights were two converging scars across the breast of the fading twilight”) further mar this lukewarm effort. (Nov.)