The Minotaur (Jake Grafton)

I am very happy with this purchase. It came in good condition and will go perfect in my library.

A fine spy novel, and one of Coonts' best. The Grafton series in its beginning were military procedurals, about Grafton's early adventures as a carrier pilot in the Vietnam era. Later installments are more about espionage. I started with the latter, and worked my way back to the former. The latter are good but not exceptional, enjoyable for their low-key and realistic tone. Grafton's character comes through more in the earlier ones, where Coonts' love and knowledge of flying add another dimension to the books, and where you get a better sense of what a stand-up guy Grafton is, and why - more so than in the later books, when he is a high-ranking officer bureaucrat sleuth getting called in to deal with sensitive matters, and where younger characters get most of the action. This book combines both elements. Grafton at its outset is literally on the beach - recovering from crash injuries that have ended his flying days, and in bad odor with the Navy despite having won the Medal of Honor, his career seemingly shot for his problems obeying orders. He snaps out of a long-term funk when he gets the call to manage development of the next-generation stealth attack bomber, as the Soviet Union begins to cave at the end of the Cold War. The project has not only the usual procurement and political problems - Congressmen with axes to grind, manufacturers with inside tracks, Pentagon employees susceptible to bribes - but a possible penetration by a disturbingly high-level spy. FBI agent Luis Camacho, charged with tracking the spy, enters the mirrors-upon-mirrors world of counterespionage, playing his cards so close to his chest his own deputy doesn't know what he's up to, or why. Sidekick Toad Tarkington is put to work navigating the experimental models, working next to the skilled but inexperienced (and beautiful) test pilot Rita Moravia. Toad has to work through this particular working-with-a-woman thing as the two must test the plane with politicians breathing down their necks. I couldn't put it down. Coonts does a great job particularly with the counterespionage, keeping you guessing until the end. Both Grafton's nostalgia for flight, and Tarkington's and Moravia's revelling in it, are well portrayed, helping expand and deepen the prose.

This is the sixth Stephen Coonts book I've read, and the first one that I liked so much that I'm giving it five stars."The Minotaur" combines two main stories that are cleverly interwoven with each other.Story 1: There's a traitor, code named Minotaur, somewhere high up in the Pentagon who is channeling America's top military secrets to Moscow. Amazingly, the Russians don't know the identity of this mole, so not just the FBI but also the KGB are feverishly doing everything they can to find out who this traitor is.Story 2: The U.S. Navy is in the midst of a procurement project to obtain a new attack aircraft to replace the aging A-6 Intruder. The new airplane will be based on stealth technology, including a top-secret device to actively suppress radar reflections.I found the procurement story to be especially interesting. There's a lot of presumably authentic inside information on how the U.S. military handles the procurement of a major weapons system. The political skullduggery involved was fascinating, with a high-ranking U.S. Senator manipulating the process in an attempt to get the contract awarded to a company in his state. This Senator was more interested in his own re-election than in whether the Navy got an optimal, or even usable, aircraft!Mixed up with the two main stories are a fair number of sub-plots, most of them concerning the lives and personalities of various people in the book. These sub-plots display Stephen Coonts' talent for creating characters who are real people, not the cardboard clichés that populate most techno-thrillers.Overall, the most enjoyable aspect of this book is the way it draws you into the story and makes you want to learn what's happening behind the scenes and why. Who is the Minotaur? Why is he (or she) passing secrets to the Russians? Will he/she be stopped?Unless you have a very good memory, I would recommend that you create and maintain a list of the main characters in the book. Otherwise, things can become rather confusing, and your chances of guessing who the Minotaur is will be minimal.There are some very exciting descriptions of the test flights involved in the procurement project, first with a modified A-6 Intruder and then with two different prototypes of the new stealth attack airplane. These narratives, and some general descriptions of the joys of flying, are an added attraction in "The Minotaur." Stephen Coonts' background as a pilot and flying enthusiast is obvious here.If you like techno-thrillers populated with real people, and if you are interested in flying and especially in military aircraft, then I'm sure you'll like "The Minotaur."Rennie Petersen

We thought Captain Jake Grafton died at the end of "Final Flight" when he deliberately flew his F-14 into a cargo plane carrying stolen nukes. We were wrong - as the first few pages of "Minotaur" make clear. The Minotaur is the codename for a Russian spy blamed for leaking sensitive military secrets to the Russians. Many think the spy a myth, but Jake Grafton - now permanently grounded and assigned a desk in the Pentagon - has to consider the mole real enough. Given control over the Navy's new stealth bomber program, Grafton confronts mysterious accidents and the mysterious death of his predecessor. He must also confront the program's more mundane obstacles - like the fact that it's impossible to design a truly effective stealth plane, and that the most promising design will be edged by the more politically attractive one. While most writers would wax eloquently on the virtues of their techno toys, Coonts looks at the advanced technology aircraft in his book dispassionately. Stealth aircraft, Coonts warns us, are underarmed, not very maneuverable, and very short-ranged. The USAF's stealth fighter, for its whiz-bangs, is essentially a Navy A-7 that (for the moment) can evade any radar in the world and drop a total of two bombs, both being the sort of high-tech toys that never work. (This book came out before Desert Storm). Combining the rigors of the program with an espionage story is pretty daring, and Coonts tries some nifty tricks. Unfortunately, though a promising idea, to many charachters really are dual charachters with assumed identities - neither of which are defined before being revealed to be other ill-drawn charachters. There are too many secret agendas and cross-plots, though Coont's writing encourages re-reading. The charachters that aren't mysterious - "Toad" Tarkington, Rita Morovia and Grafton himself remain pretty crisp, though we haven't any of the great charachters from the first "Intruder". Still a worthy read and among Coonts' best.

I truly loved the story of the devolopment of a new military jet with all the difficulties that comes with such a development, a weird man who has devoloped a new generation of Stealth technoligy who isn't to easy to make a deal with is one example. That while the famous Jake Grafton was experimenting on his own scale model sailplane whit help from his neighbour boy. And, verry surprising: TOAD gets married, something I did not expected at all. A very good book with a real good Grafton story. I realy like this character and I hope he will stay in the future Coonts books.