THE LIONS OF LUCERNE
Written by Brad Thor & Reviewed by Detective Dru
See, this is the kind of modern espionage that makes old men like us PA cops yell at the neighbor’s kids from behind our screen doors. But my wife used to tell me that my stubbornness was far and away my ugliest trait, so here we go. This book deserves a fair shot so let’s see if I get to prove my wife wrong.
Donald Fawcett and David Snyder are shown in prologue as willing to go to any lengths to get what they want. How foreboding! But wait, there’s more! Senator Snyder had a secret intern boyfriend named Mitch who was going to blackmail him for the crime of being gay before dying quite conveniently in a DC drive by. There’s also some type of secret meeting debating the fossil fuel rollback. Fawcett invested in traditional power sources, not alternatives. And then please read the following sentence in your most ominous inner voice. “StarGazer” has agreed to their plan on the condition that the POTUS is returned alive after they’re done.
Gerhard Miner, Swiss head of security that used to crack Swiss defenses to stress test them, is being pestered by Claudia Mueller about missing weapons. After brushing her off, he travels to Europe with his doppelgänger cousin in order to establish an alibi. With his cousin being demonstrative and memorable to witnesses in Greece, Gerhard flies to USA while reading about POTUS Jack Rutledge. We are not even to chapter two and have already pulled out all the stops. No more foreplay, to quote Pierce Brosnan.
Scot Harvath, hero, is skiing with Amanda Rutledge, the president’s daughter, while POTUS skies elsewhere on the mountain, an easy slope and a hard slope. Scot sees two agents wipe out and then can’t get them on the radio. They try to hurry Amanda back to command center per protocol, but there’s a sudden avalanche. Paging Michael Bay.
POTUS was attacked during his ski run down the double black diamond. One Arab Useff was on the assault team and was murdered by Gerhard Miner, who drugged POTUS after he crashed amidst the ensuing chaos. Looks like Miner is trying to frame the middle east by leaving Useff’s corpse on the slopes as the rest of his Swiss ambush team darts. Command center has radio silence for eight minutes and no longer suspects the weather. It’s now a hostile situation! Miner and his crew make their escape thru the woods after stripping POTUS and putting him on a toboggan. As they reach safety, the avalanche is triggered.
Scot and Amanda get caught in the avalanche and crash into some crevice cave thing. The namesake Lions move out in formation with hidden snowmobiles carrying POTUS. Apparently this avalanche and weather has disabled all non Lion technology exclusively. The Lions meet up is actually a nearby farmhouse for a Mormon family. They’re usually gone Sundays, but happen to be there this Sunday because hubby didn’t feel well. Their barn houses something for the Lions but the one lion kills the couple right before his team arrives on snowmobiles.
Miner arranges a charter from Provo to London, claiming POTUS is a burn victim from some oil fire caused by big oil and wants back to London to die surrounded with family. His transport can’t be unzipped for fear of infection. The smooth talking element of this kidnapping is engaging but the plausibility, not so much. Scot goes to the crime scene and cold cocks an FBI agent guarding the scene. He’s not supposed to be part of any investigation but protocol be damned when POTUS is missing! (shouldn’t that be when policy procedure & protocol is most important?) Scot checks out the dead bodies and feels bad about his dead friend Sam who got him the POTUS detail originally. The dead assailant has a Czech weapon, popular with terrorists.
The guy that Scot punched calls Senator Snyder with an update on their plan. One of his secret boyfriends heard the whole conversation on the phone upstairs while Snyder issued marching orders for the next phase of their plan. How convenient! Andre caught both phone calls and Snyder confronts him in the shower shortly after.
Scot convinces himself to go rogue because saving POTUS is the only way of saving his career. He can’t go back to SEAL (pride) Such relatable stakes! The guy is assaulting people after mucking up the president’s detail, and he’s worried about being demoted to a dream job for 98% of enlisted servicemen. The lack of perspective in this story is a rather unwelcome distraction.
Scot choppers with two others to the peak and confirms there was an explosion that started the avalanche. Cue CSI: Miami cutaway and cool sunglasses. Somehow, Scot magically learns of the Mormon Maddox farmhouse on the return flight and convinces the pilot to drop him at the farm. Local cops already there, but Scot cons his way into the crime scene and investigates the dead couple. He then goes to the barn and pieces together that the POTUS handoff happened here right before FBI Lawlor shows up, presumably pissed at Scot’s unwelcome presence. Lawlor and Scot argue in the barn. Lawlor was a former mentor and Scot’s dad’s best friend before he died. Lawlor also went rogue in a previous case but doesn’t want to hear about it now.
Side note, Brad Thor really loves “made his way” as an action phrase. How compelling. A meeting is called in the WH situation room. Despite the evidence, it doesn’t feel like middle eastern work. Ransom arrives, they want 4M that the Egyptian government seized and the release of two Disney bombers. VP and his chief of staff Defina are hostile toward Scot and JSOC General Paul Venrick. While there is not sufficient intel, VP orders the mission move ahead anyhow. They reached out to Syria for further help, deducing that POTUS must be where the ransom call came from in Beirut.
The SEAL mission goes for the glory and team with local Israelis for the assault and hopefully extraction of POTUS. Good tension in the writing, but ultimately tipped readers that it was bogus intel because Scot “didn’t like it.” Somehow “the voice” calls into the sit room and reiterates his demands for freeing the two prisoners and the Egyptians unfreezing the assets. Everyone in the room is not impressed with how VP is handling it. Lawlor recognized the voice.
Scot is dropped at home when coincidentally his old friend Natalie calls, a colleague who does Social for POTUS. She’s scared and needs to meet with him, they meet at a bar. She brought Andre, who tells Scot he has info regarding the kidnapping based on his eavesdropping. Andre tells him about overhearing Star Gazer and that Snyder once lied to him about going to France when he was actually going to Switzerland. Scot has him and Natalie stay in a safe house hotel in Alexandria until he can arrange solid protection.
Scot goes to his boss’s house, Shaw. Tells him about Andre and Natalie and what he saw in Park City. Shaw agrees it’s enough to put Andre in protective custody and places a call. Now Shaw is in on it too. How convenient to keep this melodrama rolling right along! He calls Senator Rolander to let him know that Snyder was sloppy and overheard by Andre. Rolander then calls Snyder and stuns him by knowing all about Andre. He tells Snyder to go home and call him from a secure line because he knows where Andre is (the Radisson in Alexandria). Snyder drives to the hotel and is able to trick the two into getting into his Suburban. Andre recognizes his voice immediately despite the precautionary blindfold, but it’s too late.
And then chapter 40. Your big twist with Shaw and you open with all passive tense?? Really juvenile. This is why old readers yell from behind their screen door. Scot gives his debrief to Shaw and returns home, only to be knocked out upon entering. (The hair was missing from the door gap, Mr. Bond) He awakes to a tossed apartment and a report on TV that Natalie and Andre were found dead. He deduces that his gun is missing and will be the murder weapon. Police arrive and Scot sneaks out the back.
Now to the next eye roll, no breaks allowed. Scot miraculously was given a key by Andre that we just found out about. He goes to the train station and unlocks Andre’s secret locker to find a letter that is just xerox copies of Snyder correspondence. Two hot men try to kill Scot in the station but he escapes. Since his atm card no longer works, he “makes his way” to his security deposit box at the bank.
There’s another shootout along the way, Scot escapes. Must be tracking his credit card, so he ditches it and now has 20k cash instead. He books a flight to Switzerland in the morning and puts on a disguise, using some fake passport an old German friend from the SEALS had once given him. There’s deposits in his bank account from the Caribbean from right before the kidnapping and the deceased Andre Martin is shown to be the financier. The frame job is on! This part has been pleasantly enjoyable, as much as the first 40 chapters have underwhelmed.
Next big twist incoming: Star Gazer = VP. How cliché. Snyder and Rolander argue with VP Marshfield about how bad the plan is going. VP just received POTUS’s finger(!) with a ransom note for 50M which was not part of his deal. Snyder reveals he’s got a team watching Scot and that he’ll be taken care of next time he shows his face (even though he’s currently being watched? Makes no sense) Plus it’s pretty obvious Brad’s editor found a plot hole with “why not just kill Scot when you jumped him at his apartment” and the author fixed it by having Snyder acknowledge it was a mistake not to kill them when they had a chance. So. Many. Convenient. Conveniences.
Scot yells bomb! at some public station to cause chaos. A gunman still finds him and chases him to some farm where Scot kills him with a ski pole before he gets shot at by someone else. This has gotten rather bold in its ridiculousness. Even Michael Bay would be exasperated. Scot gets shot in the arm and steals a snowboard and jumps on a gondola that heads toward his first town. He calls Jackie and tells her to pick him up because he’s hurt. She stitches him up and lets him borrow her car. Scot drives to Munich to visit an old friend Herman, he needs information and a favor.
Herman explains the Lions of Lucerne to Scot, who thought they were mythical. Used to be liaisons for the different military factions running Serbia during the post Yugoslavia years, which is a very cool back story that is wasted on this turd. Scot is now back at Jackie’s and awakes to see this character “Aunt Jane” with his guns. She’s not only a secret agent, but conveniently a great friend of Jackie’s and is now suddenly attractive since her and Scot will be working together. They both want answers and their cases are connected. At some point this is no longer about poor writing and about a complete disregard and lack of respect for your audience. Scot and Claudia compare notes and independently come up with Lions of Lucerne. Off we go.
Claudia pulls over to a rest stop on the drive to Lucerne and calls her boss who informs her that suddenly the missing weapons she’s been chasing have appeared. At her parent’s house. Another frame, now she’s pissed. It’s just the same scenario over and over and over again…They visit Miner’s cousin they just found out about. He looks just like Gerhard Miner, so they deduce he was the one laying down the alibi by being seen in Greece while Miner scooped POTUS. These guys are making connections that Sherlock Holmes on the Limitless drug would’ve missed. Miner then calls Claudia, such perfect timing. They agree to meet for lunch after sharing veiled threats.
Scot and Claudia go to some winery after figuring out Claudia’s wine and Andre’s dessert wine from earlier in the book were the same vintage. They learn it’s from South Africa. They leave the winery thing and are shot at apparently by Miner’s men? Not even seeing where the author is bothering to clarify. Can’t blame him, it’s the same schtick over and over. Scot jumps into some water to escape. They keep shooting at him but somehow Claudia fishes him out of the water before he gets caught in a dam. But as soon as he’s out of the water the shooting resumes. How unlucky and not contrived at all. They conveniently end up at a taxi stand that takes them back to their car so they can escape to old Lucerne.
Oh boy, better buckle up for Chapter 70. The shooters are killed. Claudia finds lift tickets on each of them. The tickets are for Pilate mountain, where Pontius is buried. Then suddenly she remembers her grandfather used to build secret mountain fortresses for the Swiss army. And he just so happened to build one on Pilate mountain that’s been abandoned! Gee that worked out well. Anyway that’s where Miner and POTUS must be. Claudia and Scot start “making their way” there. Also because Miner said “under God” instead of the more traditional colloquialism to the region, that means he must be hiding in the church that’s there. Seriously.
Harvath calls Lawlor and tells him everything (Plot armor for deus ex machina at the end I’m assuming) Claudia is at home alone and some giant American attacks her and she kills him. Scot shows up at the last second and she cries. Scot and Claudia drive away from Bern. They hike for six hours to the church and Scot sorta falls, the assault rifle strap only thing from him tumbling to death. Claudia saves him but not before being shot at. They kill two sentries. They get in the giant church and immediately find the secret door because of some ring Claudia’s grandfather wore apparently, but alas, they’re discovered. She kills one in the head and another by stabbing him in the neck. The weapons cache she was framed for is there. A bunch of others show up for yet another shootout. They deduce and locate POTUS because there’s a pile of camel shit in front of his door. They find him, his finger is missing, and Miner shows. Blah blah Scot punches him nearly to death and as they escape, USA forces arrive just in time to kill the last assassin that’s been chasing Scot since DC.
Scot and Claudia recover in a hospital in Geneva two days later. Lawlor storms Donald Fawcett’s house as he’s charged with the kidnapping. Instead, they only find the two senators (Snyder and Rolander) executed. Scot goes to see POTUS. Everything everywhere was a ruse because the villains all had personal agendas outside the common goals so all the betrayals and coincidental behavior and plot twists are all wrapped up. Also the VP died of suicide. They offer Scot chief of White House security but he wants a favor instead. Scot kills Fawcett on some Russian yacht with POTUS listening in. Thank God our long national nightmare is finally over.
