The Red Room by Ridley Pearson
Friday, June 27, 2014 at 8:58AM 
Published by Putnam on June 17, 2014
John Knox and Grace Chu meet their handler, a fellow named Dulwich, inside the secure Red Room at Rutherford Risk to receive their latest assignment. Knox needs money to pay for medication that helps his brother's emotional disorder. The mission he reluctantly accepts involves the delivery of stolen art to Istanbul, followed by a meeting with an important man. Why it is necessary to spend five minutes with the man is something Dulwich will not explain, although he assures Knox that he is not setting up a target for assassination. Chu's role initially involves cyber intelligence (her specialty), but she later joins Knox doing the field work that she prefers.
The Red Room has the kind of tradecraft and chase scenes that add excitement to a spy novel, but the secret to a successful espionage thriller is intrigue -- the hidden motivation, the unforeseen betrayal. The intrigue here involves the true purpose of the meeting that Knox and Chu are meant to have with the buyer of the stolen art. The reason they need to spend five minutes with the buyer is clever although it seems like a convoluted way to accomplish a task that could surely have performed with considerably less effort.
As the plot moves toward the payoff, Ridley Pearson provides a good bit of repetitive information -- about the mission, about the characters, about past missions -- that serves no useful purpose other than contributing to the novel's word count. Still, the novel moves quickly and although much of it is less than gripping, it always held my interest. The last few chapters are particularly intense.
It takes a particular skill that Pearson has not mastered to write a novel in the present tense. I was also annoyed by Pearson's sentence fragments. The technique is meant to communicate a sense of swift action but in this case I thought it communicated substandard English. That is not to say that Pearson is an incapable writer, but I would probably have enjoyed this novel more if he had written it in a different style.
The Red Room makes frequent references to earlier events involving Knox and Chu that I assume are chronicled in the two previous Risk Agent novels. I haven't read those and, while The Red Room is not a bad novel, it does not inspire me to do so.
RECOMMENDED WITH RESERVATIONS