Review – Targets Down

FBI agent Matt Hogan’s Joint Terrorism Task Force conducts a sting to convert a small-time drug dealer into an informant about neo-Nazi operations in Los Angeles. The sting ends with the target in the same hospital where an FBI agent’s wife is recovering from wound she received when she saw murderers disposing of a body and they tried to eliminate witnesses. The target of the sting turns informant, claiming knowledge of the murder, illegal weapons sales, and much more. With the target’s help, Hogan takes on the dangerous undercover job of developing information for the Terrorism Task Force.

The task takes him into a sleazy bar and brothel owned by the ex-KGB operative Boris Gregorian, staffed by imported sex slaves, and patronized largely by neo-Nazis. As Hogan penetrates deeper and deeper into Gregorian’s criminal enterprise, and eventually to terrorist activities, he experiences greater and greater personal dangers. And his situation is complicated by a web of frustrating wrangles with the restrictive—and safe—FBI bureaucracy.

He author’s personal experience with undercover operations allows him to fill the novel with voluminous detail, giving it the ring of authority from the very first page. Without slowing the narrative, Hamer portrays the FBI’s painstaking application of law in the accumulation of evidence, the tight-knit camaraderie of field agents, and the field agent’s conflicts with office-bound bureaucrats. The novel also provides an inside view of illegal immigration, the sex-slave trade, insurance scams, and other crimes. It is the cumulative effect of specific details that gives the novel ever-increasing intensity as the story approaches climax. In Targets Down, Hamer delivers a gripping suspense novel which could also be read as a textbook on criminal enterprise and undercover operations.