-- Order the book!!
PAPERBACK -- Order
the Audio Cassette
ASSUMED IDENTITY
By David Morrell
Warner Books (1993)
Reviewed by Robert Thompson October 21, 1993
-- Order the book!!
PAPERBACK -- Order
the Audio Cassette
ASSUMED IDENTITY is a middling good book. Not the equal of Morrell's BROTHERHOOD OF THE ROSE and its sequels, but still an entertaining story.
The story begins the Yucatan Peninsula of Mexico about four hundred and thirty years ago, and concerns the destruction of Mayan codices by Spanish Conquistadors. These codices contained the history and arcane knowledge of the Mayans.
Jump to the present. Buchanan is an intelligence type operative, an Army officer working in a mission usually preformed under the direction of the DEA and other "civilian" agencies. Buchanan's mission is blown, due to just bad luck, and a investigative reporter, Holly McCoy, gets on his trail, sensing a Pulitzer Prize if she can get the story.
An injured Buchanan, on the run from his own people who are afraid that he has become a liability, and trying to get away from Holly and protect her from them at the same time, gets a message from a woman that he had made a promise to years before. She is in big trouble too.
With danger coming from many different directions, Buchanan is trying to do the right thing for everyone concerned. In addition to his physical injuries, he has some emotional ones as well. He has been an undercover operative so long, that he does not know who he really is, and probably does not want to find out anyway.
The story rolls along very nicely, and Morrell has once again done his homework well. He has based Buchanan's unit on one that really did exist in the late 70' and early 80's (and may still exist in some form, although I hope not, because a lot of the things that they were into were unconstitutional and often completely illegal.) In general, the action is believable and interesting. Buchanan is a very sympathetic character, and you care what happens to him. (And lots of stuff does.) He gets through on skill and inner strength alone- his luck is generally bad.
The only real problem that I had with the story is that the final showdown is totally "James Bond"- quite disappointing when everyone in the book had been behaving so realistically up to this point. The chief villain decides to put on a spectacle with Buchanan instead of killing him out of hand, an efficiency that he had insisted upon with his other victims.
Other than the ending, I really enjoyed the book. It is somewhat easier to read than some of Morrell's other stories.
Some of the stuff that he talks about was real a few years ago, but very, very highly classified, and he is the first fiction writer that I know of to use this as a basis of a novel.