Given that the books sent me for review generally range from the topics of false confessions to executions of the innocent, I was thrilled to receive a fiction book, a spy novel no less.  Jeffrey Stephens’ Targets of Deception, published by Variance did not disappoint. 

Why Jeffrey Stephens?  He’s one of us.  Jeffrey is a lawyer, a solo practitioner who, like to many of us, opened up shop in Manhattan without a client in his pocket back in the late 1970s, doing civil and criminal litigation.  Like so many of us, he made his bones case by case, standing in the well and doing what he had to do to make a name for himself and represent his clients.

But unlike us, Jeffrey did what most of us only dream about.  He took that need to write, that book inside him, and made it a reality.  And it turned out to be one heck of a good read.  I thoroughly enjoyed it, though it went so quickly that I wished there was more.

Targets of Deception is about a former CIA agent, Jordon Sandor, in post-9/11 America, having “left” the Company after his team on a covert operation was hung out to dry.  Jeffrey avoids the obvious tendency to turn this into an exercise in jingoism, and instead employs a series of plot twists which ultimately shows both the muddling of patriotism and the absurdity of a simplistic view of the good guys and bad.

As you wind your way through the streets of New York, the quays of Miami and end up in the Italian fishing village of Portofino, you appreciate Jeffrey’s firm grasp of the technical mechanics behind his story line without getting bogged down by the literary equivalent of ordinance mechanics.  You feel that he’s done his research, knows his details and has provided everything necessary to believe that Sandor has the fire power to pull it off. 

Jeffrey’s writing style juxtaposes the complex with the simple, the Latin with the Saxon, moving the reader swiftly through the story with just enough to keep it interesting at every turn without becoming heavy or prolix.  One of the fascinating aspects is that he avoids the use of profanity, though I didn’t even realize it until it was pointed out to me afterward.  The dialogue never came across as stilted or unnatural, despite the absence of curse words, a testament to good writing that conveys the message without need to use cheap language for shock value,

The story isn’t totally flawless, the hero having a love who’s violently assault early on, horribly traumatized and left in the hospital, while Sandor moves on in his work, eventually hooking up (though tastefully amd, thankfully, without too flagrant a description) with another women.  Since Sandor is not only a Company man, but a gentleman in the old school sense, this caddish behavior was somewhat troubling.  This may be an example of why lawyers aren’t often asked for advice by the lovelorn.

Targets of Deception was a great read and the first in the coming series of books by Jeffrey Stephens about Jordon Sandor, right in the mix with the best of the genre.  And I’ve got to add that this isn’t just a matter of Jeffrey writing a terrific novel, but that Jeffrey Stephens success is one that every lawyer who loves to write and wishes he could sit down and let that book out of him should take pride in.  One of our own did it, and did it well.  There’s hope for us yet.

We all need a change of pace from the stories about the misery of the law and the injustice of the system.  Get Targets of Deception and both enjoy a great read and support a lawyer who has done what we only dream about.