The Shadow Protocol by Andy McDermott

First published in the UK in 2013; published by Dell on January 28, 2014

A well trained secret agent without much personality can't recall his past. No, I'm not talking about Jason Bourne. The Shadow Protocol is about a guy named Adam who uses a machine to transfer the memories of other people into his own mind. I think the same machine showed up in an episode of The Man from U.N.C.L.E. about fifty years ago. Perhaps that was one influence upon a novel that seems to have assembled from outtakes of various thriller/spy novels, movies, and television shows.

With the help of the memory transfer machine, Adam gains the memories of assorted good guys and bad guys. This allows him to fly airplanes, to reveal the secrets of terrorist networks, and to recognize nuclear devices, depending on the knowledge he has most recently attained. Adam takes on a number of personalities as the novel progresses, which is good because he doesn't have one of his own. Why that is true becomes the story's central mystery. Adam's past has been hidden from him and so, like Jason Bourne, he must find it. And, of course, the people responsible for hiding the truth want to kill Adam before he recovers his memories.

Adam sometimes has difficulty separating his own persona from the other personas he absorbs. That conflict is the most interesting part of the novel. Rather than using it to greater advantage, however, The Shadow Protocol devolves into an ordinary action thriller. It isn't a bad action novel but it is exceedingly familiar. Andy McDermott makes action scenes easy to visualize, in part because they are standard movie fare -- running across rooftops, jumping out of a moving car, climbing down the outside of a hotel, the obligatory car chases (one of which seems to last forever). There is also a classic Bond movie scene -- the hero risking it all in a high stakes poker game against a Russian arms dealer and winning.

Supporting characters are likable and no more shallow that is typical in action novels. A woman from England who reluctantly (and for reasons that don't withstand scrutiny) takes over the job of running the memory transfer machine has a more nuanced view of national security and terrorist threats and the ethics of "black ops" than thriller characters commonly possess. She provides the novel's moral center.

The novel's key revelations are not as surprising as McDermott probably intended, despite some attempts at misdirection. Many of the events near the novel's end are particularly preposterous. Still, the novel moves quickly and McDermott's writing style is suited to the genre. The Shadow Protocol is a capably assembled novel of familiar fun but it doesn't stand apart from other action thrillers that have explored similar themes.

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