Wednesday, June 15, 2016

THE GOD'S EYE VIEW by Barry Eisler





    When Barry Eisler was asked where he got ideas for his books he said, “Direct from the U.S. government.”  A former CIA insider Eisler knows of what he writes.   Combine that with the ability to create timely, riveting stories filled with what could be tomorrow’s headlines plus state of the art technology and you have a blockbuster thriller - The God’s Eye View.

    We meet intelligent, intuituve NSA analyst Evelyn Gallagher, a single mother and sole support of her young deaf son, Dash.  Little knowing that her boss, NSA Director Gen. Anders,  has his own frightening scenario she warns him that her worldwide spy system may be undergoing a major security breach due to a meeting in Istanbul between a senior NSA official and an investigative reporter.  She further shares her suspicion that NSA has somehow been involved in removing these people.  Her trust is definitely misplaced as Anders now sees her as a threat to his God’s Eye, a data program that collects everything the government wants to know about anyone.  Not mundane things such as addresses, amount of debt, but “God’s Eye only looks at what people are trying to hide.  “It only listens when people are trying to whisper.”

    To protect his program Anders has a team of murderous enforcers - Thomas Delgado, a sadist who derives pleasure from inflicting pain and Marvin Manus, a strong man with skills that can kill and is also deaf.   Anders cannot let the public know about God’s Eye, but now that there has been a breach and information gathered that could destroy the program stored on a thumb drive, he must find out who has the thumb drive and have that person killed.  The lengths he will go to in order to shift attention from what he is doing are horrendous.

    Eisler makes prime use of his knowledge of spying and hand-to-hand combat to propel his story at a rapid pace.  The God’s Eye is a timely thriller that may cause readers to wonder just how much of Eisler’s tale is fiction and how much might be fact.

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