GLENN COHEN

Glenn Cohen is a lawyer.

He is not a spy or anyone who has ever had to deal with a spy or anything close to being a spy. Unless you counted drug dealers. Of course they are not spies either but they definitely spend a lot of time in the shadows, much like the stereotypical operative is said to. Drug dealers are people that Cohen understands quite well, which is reasonable because he spends a lot of time with them, all trying to keep them from spending too much of their lives behind bars after they are caught dealing those drugs.

But Cohen will become involved with spies eventually and as a result, his membership in this compendium is understandable. He will not want to become affiliated with them and he will not be at all glad that he is mixed up in their business but his willingness will hardly be factor in the matter.

Back to that first meeting, though. We join up with Cohen when he is meeting with a potential new client, another drug dealer, in the parking lot of a restaurant in a very rough part of town late at night. Cohen was not concerned about the locale or the time or obvious sketchiness of the meeting because he had done so before, apparently enough times to not make him bothered. At least not until a speeding car slowed enough to let the passenger fire numerous bullets into the drug dealer and then disappear.

That, understandably, bothered Cohen. Not enough to get him to call the police, however. And not enough to keep him from snatching from the dead man's front seat a bulging briefcase. And not enough to decide back in the office to not only not relinquish the over half million dollars he was now in possession of.

What bothered Cohen was how to keep possession of that money. And that concern will soon have him deciding a new life elsewhere was in order and that new life will be in Thailand and that was all seven years ago.

Now it is the present and Cohen is very happily living in that country and has been since his windfall and he is not at all thinking that his life will be changed. Then it is when the CIA comes calling needing a bit of help and having enough force behind their threats that saying no is not really an option.

     I had a really, really good time with this series and I make note of that fact because it is so different than most of the books in the spy genre that I read. Keep in mind that since I read virtually anything spy series related, that results in a very wide variety of sub-genres. To come across one that I would still consider unique is, well, unique.

     The key here is that Cohen is a former lawyer who is not a spy and does not want to be a spy. Heck, he even quit being a lawyer. And to read the two books is to almost kind of read a journal of his day-to-day activities, since they usually mean 'get up, do something or other, go to the club for dinner and conversation and a drink or two, go home to bed. Rinse and repeat.'

     That has to sound boring as all get out but trust me, it really isn't. For one we meet all sorts of interesting people. For another, those people sometimes have very interesting problems that someone Cohen gets pulled into. For a third, some of those people have backgrounds or side jobs that are very much spy-related so when Cohen gets pulled in, well, you can see what I mean.

     The two books (so far) read very, very quickly and smoothly and before I knew it, I was done with the first and immediately headed into the second. When that one was done, I went online to see if there was a third. Not yet, but I remain hopeful!