Asian Trips - The Devil's Garden

Having visited some of the places in the book, I can say that the book is not accurate in daily life depictions, but it is realistic and plausible, which gives it depth.

Peters is definitely better than Clancy.

Don't let the fact that this title was never released in hardcover stop you from reading it. Don't even let it slow you down.

Mr. Peters takes us again to the decaying, decrepid, despoiled fringes of the old Soviet empire, this time to the oil-rich and blood-soaked Caucasus. Feudal tribesmen, ex-Soviet nomenklatura, Big Oil, the State Department, and muddle-headed do-gooders (is there a difference between those last two?) are all intertwined over a proposed oil pipeline and a kidnapped political heiress.

Standing in, I beleive, for Mr. Peters himself is our lone protagonist -- a perfect anti-hero who can see the truth like Cassandra, but can't always manage to do the right thing. But at least he's trying.

If you're looking for a fun way to learn about what might be our next battle zone in the War on Terror, pick up a copy.

"Devil's Garden" tells the story of a young American kidnapped while working for a relief program in that troubled region. Because Peters' victim is the daughter of a US senator, consequences of the kidnapping go far beyond local problems and feed a growing maelstrom that threatens to destroy order already fragile with the collapse of the USSR. Among the unlucky Yankees caught up in the chaos are the Islamic fundamentalists who carry-out the kidnap, the local chieftains who can't be sure what their own role in the kidanpping is, the American intelligence officer sent to lead the rescue, his lover, her husband, the republic's leaders ready to tear their oil-rich state to shreds and an army willing to battle anybody to the death - if they can just learn how to shoot. As a good indicator of the managed chaos, our hero, the aforementioned intelligence officer, tries to determine who would kidnap the senator's daughter by trying to find who's responsible. Bit with the fate of the tiny asian republic's oil at stake, and the militant forces welling up in the population, it's soon clear that nobody is responsible for anything. Peters manages this chaos well. something I appreciate through all of Peters books is his resolute reluctance to point fingers and lay blame - his charachters do that, but are compensated with well nuanced faults that make their objectivity suspect. The guerrillas are fearsome, but not the murderous, callous warriors of god we've seen in other books (or on CNN for that matter). The region's warlords, despite sparking a war that threatens to explode beyond their own borders, are just greedy and - in a masterful anti-climax occurring when the factions meet - go at each other much as the corporate directors in a hostile buy-out. One wonders how the directors of Time-Warner and Disney would have settled their cable-disputes if they had to fight with guns and soldiers instead of lawyers, bloated stock prices and otherwise empty content. The biggest revelation is the hero himself, who, despite being an expert on the region, is actually more lost than any of his fellow Americans. It's all chaotic, but Peters keeps the novel from falling apart and the chaos only adds scale to a blighted country and those who live there and are set on destroying it.