Red Star Falling

The second entry in Berry and Blackwood’s Luke Daniels series (after The 9th Man) is a paint-by-numbers disappointment. Daniels, fresh off a secret mission for the justice department, is approached by the CIA with intriguing news: John Vince, Daniels’s missing-and-feared-dead partner from a prior operation in Ukraine, is thought to be alive. Meanwhile, former Russian president Aleksei Delov fears that current Russian dictator Konstantin Franko has plans to reconquer the former Soviet republics. Aleksei, who’s dying of brain cancer, intends to resurrect Red Star, a dormant Cold War–era satellite-based nuclear weapon, to destroy the Kremlin from space. Daniels sets off to rescue Vince from a secret island gulag, then to locate one of the Red Star program’s designers, who points him toward a manuscript from the lost library of Ivan the Terrible that contains codes to deactivate the device. The historical details feel tacked-on, the gunfights are perfunctory, most of the protagonist’s obstacles are easily overcome with a phone call, and there’s precious little comeuppance for the bad guys. Fans will hope the authors’ next collaboration is a return to form. Agent: Simon Lipskar, Writers House. (June)