DANGEROUS ALLIANCE Randall Krzak – Political Thriller, Action/Adventure, Thriller/Suspense

Dangerous Alliance, the second volume in Randall Krzak’s Bedlam counterterrorism thriller series, takes the team to the Middle East to disrupt an unholy alliance between North Korea and Somali pirates to hijack oil tankers in exchange for weapons.

Talk about a thriller ripped from the headlines!

Once again, in severe straits because of the maniacal rule of its dictatorship, North Korea finds itself running out of oil. It turns to its “friends” throughout the world—Russia, China, and Iran—but it finds that those friendships have limitations. Shipping oil to North Korea is one. Desperate for answers, the country’s Dear Leader turns to one of its own, an ambassador, and threatens him with the decimation of his family unless he comes up with an answer. Pushed to the limit, the ambassador comes up with a wild but plausible scheme: hire Somali pirates to snatch oil tankers sailing from the Red Sea through the treacherous Gulf of Aden. The ships get repainted, their transponders turned off, and countries friendly to North Korea allow the purloined oil to reach its final destination.

As world events demonstrate, stopping the Somalians is no easy task. But an international intelligence group headquartered in London, calling itself Bedlam, plans to dispatch members of its elite, multinational strike force to the Middle East to fight the pirates and restore order to that part of the world. Neither Bedlam nor the North Koreans know each other’s plans add to the certain knowledge that the two forces will clash in a major confrontation.

That’s one of the threads in this multilayered fully engaging novel, the second in the Bedlam series of thriller novels.

Two other stories run parallel to the North Korean oil hijacking. One involves Soo, the North Korean ambassador, his aide Kim, and their attempts to stay alive by fulfilling the Dear Leader’s wishes knowing that they face certain death if they fail to do his bidding. And the North Korean leader doesn’t help things, changing the nature of the offer to the Somalian pirates at the last moment and ultimately cheating the pirates when and if they actually receive the promised weapons.

The other story follows the Somali pirates as they plan and execute their schemes to secure the tankers. Part of their plan involves creating bloody diversions to keep police forces engaged in fighting acts of local terrorism and focusing less on the pirates’ activities in the waters off East Africa. Their diversionary attack on the Somalian capital of Mogadishu is fierce, well-executed, and gripping reading as the pirates race from site to site, blowing up key structures in the city to keep police attention on terrorism, not on piracy on the high seas. Things, however, do not go smoothly. Diversions go tragically wrong, leading a few to suspect a traitor among them.

The theme of “Who can you trust?” hangs heavily over the actions of the North Koreans, the Somalis, and the forces of Bedlam itself. A few significant characters turn out not to be who readers think they are—don’t even try to guess who they are—and the twists add an extra layer to the tension of this well-crafted novel.

Krzak’s unique knowledge of this world shines throughout this book. The missions undertaken by both good and bad guys feel authentic; the locations feel real, the political and social conditions reflect the author’s obvious understanding of these worlds. The story doesn’t rely on distractions such as one single character to follow; i.e., no James Bond, no George Smiley, or a love affair, a hot-blooded night between the sheets to offset the action. Dangerous Alliance relies on solid storytelling with events so plausibly terrifying that readers may not be able to sleep – for weeks.

If you like your action hot, if you enjoy thrillers with some relationship to the real world, if you enjoy well-written complex stories with some good twists and turns, Dangerous Alliance deserves a place on your reading list. This title won 1st Place in the 2018 CIBAs, Global Thrillers Awards.