Banquo’s Ghost Goes Covert

A “cleaner” for the CIA. A deceased former agent who remains “a surprisingly lively comrade” and confidante. The use of hallucinatory drugs in Native American religious rituals and for interrogation purposes. All of these ingredients and many more figure into The Echelon Vendetta, a debut thriller by a pseudonymous former soldier and intelligence officer who calls himself David Stone. Critiquing the novel today in January Magazine, David Thayer writes that it “made critic Janet Maslin's list of Da Vinci Code clones in a recent New York Times article. But it doesn’t really belong there. This author had something more interesting in mind.”

Read Thayer’s whole review here.