Dead Heat-Joel C. Rosenberg

Dead Heat
Joel C. Rosenberg
Tyndale, Mar 2008, $24.99, 384 pp.
ISBN: 9781414311616

President James Macpherson is on his way to Los Angeles to give a speech at the Republican National Convention at the Staples Center. His intelligence team killed a terrorist they has been hunting for years but in his computer they find a map of the Staples Center. They think the terrorists are targeting the president but are confident that they have him protected. The Secret Service is proven wrong when container ships launch scud missiles with nuclear warheads at D.C., Seattle, Manhattan, and Southern California killing the president and many others.

Vice President Oaks is now the president and he and his advisors are in a bunker deep underground. He intends to make the country who launched the bombs pay for killing millions of Americans but he has no idea what country it is. North Korea is prepared to invade the South and could have done it as they had the means. The new president of Iraq who makes Saddam Hussein look like a choir boy hates the Americans and is in league with the U.N. Secretary-General. He is prepared to go to war to prevent the Kurdish providence from succeeding and joining the new Kurdistan. Israel builds the Third Temple to the consternation of other nations. It looks like intelligence is needed to figure out who killed America and since the infrastructure is destroyed, the US must depend on its allies and what little intelligence they have from contact with the field.

Joel C. Rosenberg writes a political thriller think is based on today’s headlines and most of the events in DEAD HEAT could conceivably happen. The action is non stop from the very first page and the politicians and elected officials feel lifelike. It is interesting to see what happens when a first strike hits America and how the country reacts to most of its land made wasted. Mr. Rosenberg is fantastic writer whose chilling and exciting novels make him one of the best thriller authors writing today.

Harriet Klausner