Features
- Cover Type: Hard Cover with 512 pages
- Published by: Sweetwater Books January 22, 2008
- Written in: English
- ISBN 10 Number: 1599550946
- ISBN 13 Number: 978-1599550947
-
Book Dimensions:
8.8 x 6.2 x 1.9 inches
- Weighs: 1.8 pounds
From Publishers Weekly
Even die-hard conspiracy theorists will be dubious about the sinister government-led plots that form the shaky foundation of this political thriller. Alten, best-known for his gory novels featuring giant prehistoric sharks (
Meg;
The Trench), goes well beyond the already far-fetched idea that the Bush administration let the devastating 9/11 attacks happen to further the neoconservative agenda of reshaping the Middle East. In 2012, with centrist conservative David McKuin in the White House, the federal government plots to detonate a nuclear bomb in a U.S. city and blame Iran as a cover to take out that country's radical leadership. Standing in the plotters' way is Ace Futrell, an energy expert whose murdered wife was possibly targeted by U.S. intelligence. An awkward mix of actual and fictional political figures (Hillary Clinton is still in the Senate in 2012, having lost the 2008 election to McKuin) doesn't make this paranoid and superficial book more plausible.
(Jan.) Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Product Review
A nerve-wracking thriller about America's addiction to Middle Eastern sweet crude and the network of enablers who keep our dependent nation away from detox. --
Kirkus ReviewsSteve Alten proves his versatility in his latest thriller THE SHELL GAME, a tour-de-force thriller tackling oil, politics, and the state of the world. Controversial, shocking, meticulously researched, and sure to raise many eyebrows in Washington, Alten has produced both a dazzling political thriller and to a cautionary tale for our times. Anyone interested in the labyrinthine world of politics, international gamemanship, and the control of oil in society requirements to read this book. --
James Rollins, New York Times bestseller of The Judas StrainWhether you embrace it or refute it, The Shell Game cannot, and should not, be easily dismissed. This is Steve Alten s boldest, bravest book to date. He s fearless, in fact, and his skills as a storyteller have not dulled. The Shell Game leaves you shattered, angry, and demanding change.
-Andrew Tallackson, Michigan City (Indiana) News-Dispatch entertainment editor Action packed, intense, and politically probing, The Shell Game is an intriguing blend of fiction and nonfiction that will most certainly disturb the practitioners of the game, because it will make readers stop and think about American foreign policy in the oil-rich Middle East. --
Richard Folsom, Washington Daily News
Reader ReviewsThis review contains spoilers. Deal or move on. It's good that a (semi) major popular writer has written a (semi) major popular novel presenting the basic idea that the USA mil.gov can, does, and will pepetrate mass-murder false terror schemes for fun and profit. It's always absolutely astonishing to me when the average American's first reaction to the idea of 9/11 as an inside job is to gasp "No way the USA gov would murder 3,000 of their own people!" Huh? First of all, where does anybody get off asserting that we are the mil.gov's people? As though they own us? Second, of course nobody is charging that the entire USA mil.gov signed some executive order or legislative proclamation to murder those 3,000. Obviously it was a relatively small and secretive group. The average GS-10 mathematician working for the Bureau of Labor Statistics is innocent and pure as driven snow, ok? And then finally, there's some kind of shocked ascriptive morality behind that reaction, like sure they'd invade and destroy South Vietnam and Iraq, train and equip SAVAK and Pinochet and Guatamalen Death Squads - they'd decimate all kinds of places stocked with non-Caucasian cattle, but surely would hesitate to snuff a few thousand New Yorkers. Those people need to review the classic scene from The Godfather: "Kate, now who's being naive?" (Michael Corleone) Anyway, you can infer from the paragraph above that yes, Shell Game takes on USA mil.gov false flag terror. But it goes at the project very half-heartedly. Alten's view on 9-11 is pretty tepid - he seems to think that yeah, the 19 Al Qaeda guys did it, but there were warnings that may have been deliberately suppressed or ignored. So one thing I disliked about Shell Game, is that Alten gives very short shrift to the deeper analyses of 9-11 as an inside job. He pretty much just tsks-tsks over missed warnings or faulty intelligence, lack of due diligence, and leaves it at that. Hello champ, it's a whole lot worse than that. Read David Ray Griffin. Listen to Richard Gage. (Neither is listed in his Suggested Reading). But 9-11 is ancient history right? So over! So 2001! We Americans have always been a forward-looking people, and what we have to look forward to is escalation from boxcutters on planes to nukes in an American city. Alten is not some wild-eyed radical with that prediction - Dick Cheney and others have stated exactly the same many times. And look at the perfect linearly ascending line of escalation of False Flag Firepower and scale of target: JFK ==
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