#28: Pursuit of the Eagle by Nick Carter

 Killmaster Nick Carter is tracking an intelligent dog (!) when he finds what looks to be a missing American plane, and is soon on the trail of a kidnapped scientist in Pursuit of the Eagle.

This novel is part of my careful re-read of a favorite series as a youth, before I knew that Nick Carter wasn't a real person but a full slate of authors of various abilities.  I selected this one because it was written by Gayle Lynds, a thriller writer whose work I also read steadily--under her own name--as a young man.

This is a meat-and-potatoes thriller, but feels kind of low-stakes, with Carter being chased by Bulgarian spies and a not particularly adept German terrorist group while being helped by a Macedonian freedom fighter and a jolly French spy.

The mid-80s Eastern European politics seems about right, and the action comes steadily, so a solid entry for fans of the series.  Lynds wrote a handful of these--as did her husband, Dennis Lynds--and I would read another if I found one.

I've been steadily picking these Nick Carter books up here and there and read this one quickly.

#36: The Hades Factor by Gayle Lynds and Robert Ludlum

Current scientist and former badass John Smith grows suspicious when his girlfriend dies suddenly of a mysterious ailment; and when he looks into it more closely, he (naturally) unearths a global conspiracy in The Hades Factor, the first in the Covert One series.

Robert Ludlum apparently sketched in this series of novels before his death, and the details were handed over to a handful of writers; this first one fell to Gayle Lynds, who has been a pretty solid thriller writer in her own right.

This is a fun but entirely undemanding read, one of those novels where the characters never stop at a Taco Bell to eat but have time to train a mountain lion as a pet.  Interestingly, it was written just before 9/11, in what seems to be a rosier time when a diabolical corporate businessman could be the villain in an international thriller.

The Covert One series has numbered quite a few adventures to date and has its appeal to the technothriller/medical thriller crowd, and would be recommended to those readers.

I listened to a solid audiobook version on loan from the Morrisson-Reeves Public Library in Richmond, Indiana.