ANDROCIDE: INTEL 1 Series, Book 5
Fiction
One giant leap for womankind
ANDROCIDE
INTEL 1 Series, Book 5
By Erec Stebbins
339 pp. Twice Pi Press
Reviewed by Eric Petersen
Techno thriller master Erec Stebbins is back with the fifth entry in his INTEL 1 series, (the previous entries are also reviewed on this site) taking it in an even darker and more compelling direction that reflects current events in the United States.
At this point in the series, INTEL 1, once the FBI’s top counterterrorism unit, headed by former agent “Mad John” Savas and his wife, former agent Rebecca Cohen, has become a super secret “black ops” group, answerable only to President Elaine York, restored to power after a right-wing military coup had ousted her.
The coup nearly plunged the United States into a full-scale second civil war, but thankfully, the insurrection was put down and the right defeated after INTEL 1 (and a mysterious computer hacker calling himself Fawkes) exposed the architects of the coup – the Bilderberg Group – and prevented them from destroying America.
The Bilderberg Group was a small cabal of the world’s richest and most powerful people who, for over a hundred years, controlled the world's governments, political parties, financial organizations, and organized religions from their secret headquarters at the Bilderberg Hotel in the Netherlands. Though the Group was smashed by INTEL 1, it wasn’t destroyed completely.
Androcide opens on the mean streets of New York City and grabs the reader right by the throat, as the notorious serial rapist known as Jack the Reaper, now out of prison, eyes a teenage prostitute plying her trade outside of a 7-Eleven store:
The whore by the 7-Eleven was perfect.
Too perfect, really. Wetback cunt with long back hair. Seventeen maybe unless that bucket of makeup lied. Goddamn chest nearly exploded out of the tight, zippered jumpsuit. And those round hips – he felt them under him while she screamed for help.
Jack Reaper stepped out of the shadows. His hand reached casually into his pocket and he palmed the bills. Sadly, there would be no cries for help tonight.
Can’t believe I have to pay these sluts now.
The prostitute takes Jack to a grimy room. Unable to control his violent impulses, he attacks the girl, but she pulls out a syringe and jabs him in the leg, injecting him with a powerful sedative. Then a strong man comes in, throws Jack on the bed, stuffs him into a body bag, zips it up, and carries him off.
Meanwhile, half a world away in Tehran, Iran, INTEL 1 operatives Sara Houston and Francisco Lopez rendezvous with their contact, Nader Zaringhalam, computer hacker for Iran’s Revolutionary Guards and double agent for the West. Their immediate goal is to take down an arms dealer.
Their ultimate goal is to find and take down Mirnateghi, the most powerful and deadliest woman in Iran – and the former Bilderberg Group member known as Nemesis. Back in New York, the body of the aforementioned serial rapist Jack the Reaper is found naked and posed atop a pile of garbage bags.
Not only was Reaper savagely beaten and tortured, his penis and testicles were removed with surgical precision. Whoever killed him left a note stuffed into his mouth that read: One small death of a man; one giant leap for womankind.
The police initially suspect that Reaper’s killer is either one of his victims or the loved one of a victim. Then the body of another serial rapist, Anton Tarakovsky, is found naked and posed atop a pile of garbage bags. Like Reaper, he was savagely beaten, tortured, and emasculated. His killer left a note stuffed into his mouth – a warning that this was just A taste of things to come.
As he works the case, African American homicide detective Tyrell Sacker falls off the wagon, once again succumbing to his addictions to cigarettes and alcohol as he faces a cunning, sadistic serial killer who leaves no evidence behind and a media frenzy over the man they’ve dubbed the Eunuch Maker.
The media frenzy goes over the edge when the Eunuch Maker’s next victim turns out to be a pedophile priest, his naked, beaten, tortured, and emasculated body lovingly posed in front of St. Patrick’s Cathedral, a millstone hung around his neck in a mocking reference to Jesus’s words about those who would harm children.
Detective Sacker finds an unlikely ally and friend in Grace Gone, a very unusual private detective. A petite Chinese woman with a bad leg and a struggling business, the highly intelligent Grace possesses deductive skills that put Sherlock Holmes to shame. Sacker is forced to go behind his superiors’ backs to get her help.
While the INTEL 1 operatives literally fight for their lives in Iran to take down Nemesis, President Elaine York faces the ominous specter of her opponent in the upcoming election: a charismatic, psychopathic billionaire who’s been riding a tidal wave of white resentment and racism toward the White House.
When Grace Gone discovers that the Eunuch Maker’s emasculated victims were neither beaten nor tortured, but exhibited the symptoms of an Ebola-like virus, she and Sacker realize that the victims were merely guinea pigs in a horrific experiment conceived by a brilliant and insane mind – and, as INTEL 1 discovers, part of a diabolical plot that could mean the end of half the human race…
Androcide is another fine entry in the INTEL 1 series – a riveting, relentlessly paced techno thriller that keeps the reader turning pages. Author Erec Stebbins just gets better and better, writing with a vengeance and forcing the reader to question his most deeply held beliefs. Highly recommended!
Eric Petersen is an administrator and blogmaster for the Internet Writing Workshop, an international, online writer’s group run out of Penn State University. You can reach him by e-mail at EricPetersen1970@hotmail.com
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