“People don’t consider the benefits of being a fugitive.”– Charlie Clark
Picking up just a few weeks after the events of Once a Spy ended, Twice a Spy finds father and son Drummond and Charlie Clark, fugitives wanted for capital crimes in America, on the run trying to avoid an international manhunt for them.
Along with Charlie’s girlfriend and renegade NSA agent, Alice Rutherford, the Clarks are off the grid in Switzerland, trying to find a way to establish their innocence as well as looking into alternative treatments for Drummond’s advancing Alzheimer’s.
Having only recently learned that his father’s entire humdrum life as an appliance salesman with Perriman Appliances had been a front for his career as a CIA operative, Charlie is still coming to grips with the fact his dad has James Bond-like skills and holds secrets with world changing implications in his increasingly unreliable mind.
When Alice is kidnapped by a group that demands Drummond provide them with the location of a nuclear bomb, which was disguised as a washing machine as part of the cover project Drummond and his fellow “appliance salesmen” were working on, Charlie and Drummond once again find themselves having to rely on Charlie’s street smarts and Drummond’s intermittent flashes of his old spy self in order to stay one step ahead of the law and save the day. (more…)
Though this was a good read and I don’t regret having picked it up, ultimately there was just something…. lacking. The premise is obviously a gripping one – child disappears while on paper route and the parents’ attempts, with the help of PI Frank Behr, to find out what happened – but the way it unfolds is rushed and somewhat hackneyed.
