I rang in the new year with some mental floss.  I found David Stone’s The Echelon Vendetta on one of our bookshelves in Keystone as I was looking around for a palate cleanser after my run of serious books last week.

Last night I got about 80% of the way through it.  At around 11:20, long after Amy had gone to bed, I actually got scared reading it.  I hadn’t figured out the end game yet, so my brain was whirring around a lot.  The book was taking place mostly in the Rocky Mountain West (Montana, Wyoming, and Colorado) and I suddenly had an image of the bad guy stalking me from the giant open space behind the two story picture window I was lying in front of. 

I rarely get scared reading a book – the only thing that really gets me is when bad stuff is happening in a setting near me.  For example, I had to stop reading Dry Ice by Stephen White because of the Boulder setting.

So, that was it.  I closed the book, got a glass of water, went up stairs to sleep, and woke up around 10:30 am.  Yum.  Welcome to 2009.

I just finished off The Echelon Vendetta and it’s easily one of the best spy / CIA / conspiracy / thriller that I’ve read in a long time.  Stone’s bio says it’s “is a cover name for a man born into a military family with a history of combat service going back to Waterloo. Stone, a military officer himself, has worked with federal intelligence agencies and state-level law enforcement units in North America, Central America, and South East Asia. Retired now, Stone lives in an undisclosed location with his wife, photographer and researcher Catherine Stone.”

It shows.  I just bought Stone’s other book The Orpheus Deception on my Kindle – given my poor impulse control I expect I’ll read it next.

Disclosure: If you click though the link on this book, I get paid a small amount from Amazon (approx 6% of the purchase price) based on my affiliate code that I put in the link.  Please read the post I wrote titled The Dynamics of Full Disclosure for more on this.  I don’t plan to put this disclosure note on any more book posts this year – hopefully this will be satisfactory for anyone that cares.