Review - The Angola Deception by D C Alden

The Angola Deception is a conspiracy/spy/thriller novel, and I received it from NetGalley in return for an honest review.

This novel suffers from generic genre mediocrity in the worst possible way.

Reading this book I felt like I was again a naive teenager growing up in the 90s - watching the movie Conspiracy Theory, getting all worked up about FEMA, the New World Order, the Illuminati, and all of those other things you read about on blogs. And to bring it into the 21st Century there was a healthy dose of September 11 conspiracy.

After reading the book, I realised that the deception in the title seems to refer to the fact that Angola has virtually nothing to do with the actual novel. Okay, that's not fair, the Angola refers to an Angola virus, which the dark and mysterious forces in the world intend to unleash on the world.

We have a cast of characters who are about as generic as you might find in a thriller:

- Roy Sullivan - some working class schlep who has a missing/dead brother in Iraq. The centralish conflict in the story is that he is being blackmailed by some generic gangster into babysitting some other generic psycho for purposes unknown.
- Roy Sullivan's ex-wife, who has a new boyfriend and wants a divorce. (either Vicky or Vikki depending on the author's mood)
- Roy's autistic son Max.
- Derek - the generic psycho.
- Frank Marshall - a guy who is on the run, with some kind of Jason Bourne amnesia thing going on, but then he suddenly remembers who he is.

Generic Bad Guys
- Josh.

Some other generic bad guys I can't remember the names of. There are also the big bads, who are Committee - a shady Bilderberg Group/New World Order conspiracy who like to think they control the world.

So many things about the novel didn't make much sense to me - why Roy was being blackmailed, or even what he was being blackmailed with, or what his relationship with the generic gangster was exactly. He is forced to endure numerous beatings and generally psychotic behaviour from Derek, all the while carrying on a normalish life and working at a regular job.

So many things in this novel are predictable, and none of it really seemed to matter. Roy's role in the novel seemed to be to carry the plot of the novel until something more important happened. The problem for me was that it had a decent amount of potential, but the things that took centrestage were not the most interesting parts of the plot which was hinted at.

Overall I was quite disappointed. The premise reminded me a little of the Robert Ludlum novels published after his death by other authors, but it was nowhere near as good.

2/5 stars.