"And are you, Herr Gossinger, going to give Herr Goerner permission to tell me?" "Not unless Karl tells me I can," Goerner said. "Are you going to tell me how you know that?" "I know he's not as junior an intelligence officer as you might think he is quite the opposite." "Let me put it this way, Eric," Goerner said. "But I have reason to believe that he won't be left hanging in the breeze." ![]() "Eric, I'm as concerned as you are that Karl may be hurt, even murdered," Otto Goerner said, in the Viennese patois. "I just told you, I was very fond of your mother and your grandfather." "Why don't you let me worry about that?" Castillo said. I don't want it on my conscience that I was in any way responsible for Little Karlchen being left hanging out twisting in the wind or, more likely, being strapped into a chair with his throat cut after his teeth were extracted with pliers." "I was very fond of your grandfather and your mother. "Junior intelligence officers-and you're not old enough to be anything but a junior intelligence officer-are expendable." "You will excuse me, Herr Gossinger, if I think you are being naive," Kocian said. "You're not afraid that you and whoever gave you this order will not be-what's that wonderful American phrase?-'hung out to twist in the wind'?" "That's not going to be a problem, Herr Kocian." P.S."And what will happen when, say, your secretary of state or, for that matter, your President learns-as they inevitably will-that someone has given you these orders?" I am going to do you the favor of not linking the book, so that no temptation of any sort besets you! So, how would I rate W.E.B Griffin and “The Hostage”? A straight ZERO, regardless of the scale of reference. As you might have guessed, her supposed murder mystery also gets distracted by random nonsense, weakening both plot and characters. ![]() Look, maybe conservatives have it right, and liberals have it wrong, but good mystery fiction should leave politics out (a novel presented as explicitly political can have any amount of delusion added to it) and for heaven’s sake, have an actual plot, with actual villains, who MUST be revealed in some way, shape or form! So, all said, I will still keep listening to books from diverse authors, though, I did recently listen to Catherine Coulter and her anti-Bill Clinton tirades, which is just really sad. I don’t know how I survived, but it almost made me rethink wanting to look for diversity in reading choices. To get us there, it takes us through a meaninglessly rich hero, an extremely iconoclastic President (not in a good way) who sets up agencies left and right, extremely dysfunctional CIA agents, Fox News as the preferred viewing choice and some meandering WW II stuff. Well, the villain, or one of them anyway, teaches us how to make some crappy beef dish for half the last CD, and the novel ends really nonsensically, with NO plot! So, I did listen to this one towards the end, only if to search for what idiotic right wing (because that is the bent of this un-storied work of high-functioning gibberish as well) plot would be framed in the end. At 15 CDs, I thought he would get it right somehow. Griffin was going to go down the same path, as has been my experience with these types of novels, but the $2 price was too enticing. It was the first CD, and within 5 minutes, the author with his intolerable right wing swill, which by the way was all about attacking the left wing, did away with all mystery, entertainment and good feelings. I once stopped a Vincent Flynn Book on CD disk and heaved the whole set in the recycle bin as quickly as I could.
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