THE WALK-IN by Gary Berntsen and Ralph Pezzulo


Published in 2008 by Crown Publishing

Matt Freed is summoned on very short notice to Bucharest to interview a member of Iran's intelligence community. He was unrecruited, meaning that he is a "walk-in" - literally someone who walked into the embassy and offered information that the American government would want.

Freed has been asked to talk to this man because he is an expert on Iranian politics and he speaks the language. He is also an extremely capable intelligence operative. The interview yields valuable and very scary information. Freed starts to act on it and soon discovers that there may be more to this situation than he has been led to believe. He starts his own investigation and becomes convinced that this may be a double cross. His superiors disagree and it becomes a race against time with Freed working against foreign governments and his own...

 This is a middle-of-the-road spy novel. The action was good but sometimes the narration needed to be made more clear as the action moved from person to person. The supporting characters were never really fleshed out so they always seemed to be fairly arbitrary in their actions because they were faceless uniforms or suits, depending on the bureaucracies they served. This is a book that would have been much better if it had been expanded.

I rate this novel 3 stars out of 5.

This novel can be found on Amazon.com here: The Walk-In.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts over the last 30 days

Christianity's Dangerous Idea: The Protestant Revolution - A History from the Sixteenth Century to the Twenty-First by Alister McGrath

Image
Strong, but not for those who are not well-versed in history   Originally published in 2007. Let me just note that Alister McGrath has taken on a large topic (Protestantism) in Christianity's Dangerous Idea and done about as well as one can in organizing the information and presenting it in a cogent and readable fashion. McGrath assumes that you already know a lot about history in general and about the last 500 years or so in particular. That is to be expected. If he had to explain every last detail this book it would have to have been 3,000 pages rather than the already hefty 478 pages of text plus 50+ pages of endnotes. If you are a person that has heard of the Huguenots, but are not sure if they are a native group in South Africa or a religious group in France, this book is not for you. This is not a complete history, either. It is an overview. If you are looking for a complete history of a particular denomination, you are likely to be disappointed. Some denom...
Read more

SEPARATION of CHURCH and HATE: A SANE PERSON'S GUIDE to TAKING BACK the BIBLE from FUNDAMENTALISTS, FASCISTS, and FLOCK-FLEECING FRAUDS (audiobook) by John Fugelsang

Image
Published in August of 2025 by Simon and Schuster Audio. Read by the author, John Fugelsang. Duration: 9 hours, 24 minutes. Unabridged. John Fugelsang is seemingly omnipresent on the cable TV news/political talk show circuit. He is a talented debater because he knows how to bring the goods to an argument, especially when Christian Nationalism is involved. Fugelsang had a unique upbringing in a super-Catholic household. Why was it unusual? His mother was a former nun and his father was a former Franciscan friar. They fell in love, had a bunch of kids, and made sure that they all went to church whenever it was having a service.  In a a lot of ways, this felt a lot like my childhood. No - my parents weren't nuns or priests. But, I grew up in rural setting where my Lutheran church was one of the centers of my life. Church every weekend, most of the holiday services, Sunday school, Christmas programs, church youth group, vacation bible school, and I worked at a church summer camp for fi...
Read more

DRAGONS of WINTER NIGHT: DRAGONLANCE CHRONICLES, BOOK TWO (audiobook) by Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman

Image
Originally published in book form in 1985. Audiobook published by Audible Studios in 2013. Read by Paul Boehmer. Duration: 17 hours, 52 minutes. Unabridged. Synopsis: The war against the Dragon Queen continues. The forces of good pulled off a major victory at the end of the last novel, but now the forces of evil are looking for revenge.  Tanis, Flint, Goldmoon, Laurana, and the rest of the intrepid companions head off in search of new ways to fight the Dragon Queen's advancing armies. Or, if that fails - lead a refugee exodus. They use an ancient map from before the Cataclysm to find a legendary seaport only to find that it is no longer anywhere near the sea due to the immense destruction of the Cataclysm. As the companions try to figure out their next steps, an armada of dragons attacks the city, breathing flames from above. Dragon Army ground troops swarm into the city and the companions are split into two groups while Tanis faces the decision of a lifetime. My Review: This is a ...
Read more

THIS BOOK WON'T BURN (audiobook) by Samira Ahmed

Image
Published by Little, Brown Young Readers in 2024. Read by Kauser Mohammed. Duration: 10 hours, 34 minutes. Unabridged. Book summary Noor Khan is a senior in high school and she is devastated. Her father walked out on her family and moved back to his native England. He gave no warning and the family is reeling. Noor's mother decides that a change of location would be best. Noor, her little sister (a freshman), and her mom move from their diverse upper middle class Chicago neighborhood to a downstate Illinois small town so that her mom can work at a small college.  Noor hates it. She misses her friends and the vibrancy of Chicago. She also feels like an oddity because she is Indian and Muslim in a school that is very white and very Christian.  She determines to gut out this one last semester of high school and then head back to Chicago to go to college. She decides she doesn't need friends or even to enjoy this small town - she just needs to get in, get the diploma and then get ...
Read more

BRAVE COMPANIONS: PORTRAITS in HISTORY (audiobook) by David MCCullough

Image
Originally published in hardback book form in 1991. Published by Simon and Schuster Audio. Read by the author, David McCullough Duration: 11 hours, 19 minutes Unabridged Brave Companions: Portraits in History  is a collection of previously published articles and speeches. It's a smattering of this and that - sometimes it's about art, sometimes about scientists, sometimes about politicians and sometimes it's just some musings from McCullough about history. It doesn't matter, almost all of it is interesting and well-told. McCullough understands the value of telling history as a story - as always he is very approachable. My favorite entry was the story of the railroad that preceded the Panama Canal. It was an amazing story of the power of human will against nature. McCullough reads this audiobook, which is great because McCullough has a fantastic speaking voice and is well known for his voice work. I envy both his writing ability and his talents as a speaker. My fav...
Read more

ULYSSES S. GRANT: A VICTOR, NOT A BUTCHER by Edward H. Bonekemper III

Image
  Originally published in 2010. Re-published in 2017 by Regnery History. Do you remember back in school when you would get a topic to argue for in an essay? That's pretty much what this book is. The topic is "Grant has the reputation for wasting his men in useless attacks. Is Grant's reputation as a butcher justified?" Ulysses S. Grant: A Victor, Not a Butcher might be mistaken as a biography of Grant, but it is not. What it is is a fantastic defense of Grant's record in the Civil War. Bonekemper was a federal government regulatory attorney for 34 years before he started writing books, delivering lectures, hosting discussions and teaching classes on the Civil War as a second career after he had retired. All that practice of 34 years of digging through books and digging through stats and regulations shines through this book. You would think that what I just described is a boring book, but it is well-written and flows smoothly from one campaign to the next. Very rea...
Read more

DRAGONS of SPRING DAWNING (Dragonlance Chronicles, Book 3) (audiobook) by Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman

Image
Originally published in 1985. Audiobook published in 2012 by Audible Studios. Duration: 16 hours, 26 minutes. Read by Paul Boehmer' Unabridged. I distinctly remember loving this series 40 years ago and excitedly visiting my local bookstore to pick up a new one when they were published. I was an avid player of Dungeons and Dragons and a book series released by the publishers of Dungeons and Dragons was a guaranteed win. As the series continued to print new books, I kept on buying them. I probably owned dozen or so of them. Somewhere along the way I sold off my Dragonlance collection. I worked part time at a used bookstore at one point and they probably ended up there. When I found the books in audiobook format, I decided that it was time to revisit these books and see if they held up to my memories of uncritical acclaim. Synopsis: In The Dragons of Spring Dawning , the forces of the Dragon Queen are rolling up victory after victory. But, rather than confidently rolling up the scatt...
Read more

The Best of 2025.

Image
This is a "best of" list based on the 84 books I read and reviewed in 2025. I do not focus on new books, so there are books on this "best of" ranging from being published in 1973 to being published in 2025. The titles are active links to my reviews. *** = Best of the best in that category MEMOIR/BIOGRAPHY I acknowledge that it is odd that I found a 39 sports autobiography to be the best book in this category, but I found this to be thoroughly enjoyable read. The cover has a blurb from Playboy saying it was the "best sports book of the year." They may have been right - it is very good. If you are an old fan of NASCAR, this will be a fantastic read for you. *** King Richard I: The Autobiography of America's Greatest Auto Racer by Richard Petty with William Neely. A Paper Orchestra by Michael Jamin. Brian Epstein: A Life from Beginning to End by Hourly History. Our Subway Baby by Peter Mercurio. John Wesley Hardin: A Life from Beginning to End by Hou...
Read more

THE 1619 PROJECT: A NEW ORIGIN STORY by Nikole Hannah-Jones and others.

Image
  Published in November of 2021 by Random House Audio. Multicast Performance Duration: 18 hours, 57 minutes. Unabridged. I have developed a new hobby as of late - I read books that politicians tell people they should not read. The former governor of Indiana (and later the President of Purdue University) tried to prohibit Indiana University (or anyone else) to use a well-known history book to teach anyone anywhere. I read it. The Lt. Governor of Texas cancelled a book reading about the Alamo because it was not a hero worship book. There's a politician in Texas that  posted a list of 850 books  that he wants to ban across the state that has provided a lot of potential reading.  But, in the last couple of years nothing, absolutely nothing, has compared to the  1619 Project and the controversy it has generated. If you have not heard of the original 1619 Project , you have not been paying attention to America's culture wars. President Trump hated it so much he...
Read more

DARK SKY (Joe Pickett #21) (audiobook) by C.J. Box

Image
  Published by Recorded Books in 2021. Read by David Chandler. Duration: 9 hours, 31 minutes. Unabridged. Winner of the Spur Award for Western Contemporary Novel (2022) Synopsis: Wyoming Game Warden Joe Pickett is good at his job and is known for dealing honestly with everyone. Usually, it's a good thing to have a great reputation. But, it can also mean that people dump the uncomfortable jobs on you because they know you will do them. The new Governor of Wyoming has an idea that will pick up his slumping poll numbers - he will convince a tech mogul to build his latest server farm in Wyoming. He hopes that the prestige and, more importantly, new high-paying jobs will help the voting public overlook his scandals when it comes time for re-election. The tech mogul is sort of a combination of Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerburg. He has new skills he wants to master and the current skill he wants to master is providing himself with all of his own food. He gardens and hunts everything and he is...
Read more