Overwatch

February 3, 2014
Guggenheim’s high-energy debut thriller stars Alex Garnett as a low-level CIA attorney with a solid Washington pedigree (his dad is a presidential adviser). In the course of investigating an apparently innocuous case involving an agency operative’s divorce, Garnett stumbles onto a sinister plan to destabilize Iran and draw the country into a nuclear shootout with Israel. Before Garnett realizes what he’s blundered into, three people connected to the divorce die under mysterious circumstances, and he finds himself being tailed, then shot at. Garnett has gotten himself caught in the churning wake of the Overwatch, an organization cloaked in such darkness that not even the American president knows about it. Guggenheim, a former lawyer turned TV writer, succumbs to predictable dialogue and several formulaic devices down the stretch, but Garnett—prickly, wily, fighting to get out of his father’s shadow—will appeal to readers who appreciate an underdog. Agent: Erin Malone, WME.

March 1, 2014
In TV writer Guggenheim's debut novel, a young, newly hired CIA litigator stumbles across evidence that a ruthless shadow agency, without the knowledge of the president, is orchestrating a war between Iran and Israel. No one in Washington is terribly upset when Iran's supreme leader dies from a bad case of swine flu, Iran having taken over the role of the world's No. 1 threat in its march toward nuclear readiness. But when Alex Garnett discovers that an organization inside the CIA was responsible for the death via a weaponized virus, his dream job at Langley quickly turns into an odd-man-out nightmare. People with loose connections to the conspiracy start dropping dead, but Alex can't find anyone who will believe they were killed. The only person he can trust is a geeky hacker whose life he puts at almost as much risk as his own. There are implausible plot twists and miracle escapes, but the biggest problem with this formulaic thriller is its use of a potential Middle East meltdown as a backdrop to Alex's attempts to prove his manhood and climb out from under the influence of his father, a powerful former aide to two presidents. Perhaps if Alex were less callow and had more dimensions, he would draw more of a rooting interest. As it is, readers spend much of their time trying to fight off the feeling that he's getting what he deserves. After an opening of nasty promise, Guggenheim's debut becomes a predictable slog, with a protagonist we have no desire to see again.

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March 1, 2014
Guggenheim has taken familiar elements from the spy-thriller genre, stirred them together at fairly high heat, and cooked up an entertaining diversion. We have the everyday bloke pulled into something bewildering and scary; the wet-work, black-ops government bureau so secret even the president doesn't know about it; the hard-eyed loonya highly placed government officialwho runs the clandestine organization between sips of Macallan; and the round-shouldered computer whiz who burrows into government sites to wise up the hero. And a plot motor pulled from the headlines, in this case an attempt to bait two Middle East countries into nuclear war. Alex Garnett didn't get hired as a CIA lawyer on merit. His well-connected but distant father pulled strings. Dad's ghostly presence looms over the well-done set pieces: murders, explosions, fights, and chases. That's likely why one standard ingredient is missing here: the gorgeous female operative of ambiguous loyalties. Alex has a lover, but she dumps him when things get dangerous, thus making possible the emotional finale. The comfort of familiar genre conventions, nicely executed, with the frisson of some stealthy improvisation.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2014, American Library Association.)