Echo Five

by David Chacko

"Echo Five" takes place at the end of the world where terror is the norm and the heat arrives from the rim of hell. Jason Ender, who has been assigned to debrief high value terrorists in the Horn of... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0978970470
• ISBN13: 9780978970475
• Release Date: January 2008
• Publisher: Foremost Press
• Length: 280 Pages
• Weight: 0.91 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 6.0" x 9.0"

Customer Reviews

Deception in Spades

This is the second David Chacko book I've read, but it won't be the last. Echo Five begins as a spy novel with all the heads counted, from the boys in Washington to the men in the field. But that's deceptive. As soon as Jason Ender hits the ground in the Horn of Africa, he learns that what he needs to complete his mission--a young army lieutenant and interrogator called Echo Five--has committed suicide. Ender is suspicious, and his suspicions turn the story from espionage to mystery as he takes it on himself to find the reasons why Carolyn Fordyce died. Sleuthing his way through the modern armed forces, Ender tracks the real killer as well as others responsible for her death. He puts himself against the power structure to do it, balancing his career and the truth. When Ender's mission and Echo Five's killer come together, it makes a shocking and disturbing conclusion. It's the last deception, and the best.

A thriller/mystery

Jason Ender, a senior-level interrogator of prisoners of the Guantanamo type, is sent to a godforsaken base in the horn of Africa to help determine which, if any, of several prisoners might be a key enemy leader. When he arrives he finds that the main interrogator he was to work with, an attractive lieutenant, has committed suicide only hours earlier, for no obvious reason. Suspicions aroused, he finds loads of suspects, leads, and possible evidence indicating her death might not have been an accident. The story becomes Ender's efforts to find the cause of the lieutenant's death and those responsible (and why). There is no need to provide details here and plenty reason not to: the story is a murder mystery and generally observes the expected form, including a twist or two at the end. At the same time, the mystery is indeed set within the so-called global war on terror, complete with multiple levels of bureaucracy, military personnel and civilians with different agendas, and endlessly complex and perplexing tactical and strategic milieus. For fans of such stuff the book would be satisfying for these reasons alone. To this lay reader, the author convincingly depicts all these variables, down to the mind-set and speech characteristics of the people involved. The text is cleanly written with almost no typos or grammar glitches, and the characters' motivations, actions, and words are well thought out. They all speak in pretty much the same overwrought manner, however. Even the uneducated low-lifes glibly elaborate their speech a la Oscar Wilde, had he only been in the U.S. military. Some of these quips and some narrative stretches I found all too often completely opaque, requiring rereading, sometimes more than once. Maybe that's just me. Some may find such high style; I found it weak editing. Take, for example, the blurb on the back of the book. Blurbs are hard to write, but this one, which was mostly lifted verbatim from passages in the book, makes almost no sense at all. It makes a good, quick test. Those who find the blurb no problem should enjoy Echo Five with no qualification.

A thriller well worth your time

In the midst of the writers' strike, what the Screenwriter's Guild needed was a great writer such as Chacko in their back pocket. While self-published, this book is a testament to a prolific writer that keeps you glued to your seat with his non-stop action and excellent storytelling ability. While this is the third in Chacko's series revolving around interrogator (also called "echos") Jason Ender, there isn't much back history repeated like you'd read in a Harry Potter novel. Ender is sent to, what bin Laden called, The Third Front, also known as the Horn of Africa, to work with Echo Five, an Arabic translator, in order to question prisoner 91. Lt. Hours before Ender de-planes, Carolyn Fordyce kills herself at the self-sufficient cell community of government employees and civilians that are working for the same cause in the heat of sun, and surrounded by terrorism and subversive plots thicker than a police officers donut-filled stomach. Fordyce's suicide (a.k.a. Echo Five), turns Enders normally curious brain on fire with a burning passion to discover the truth about what happened to her "behind the wire." What he discovers is a conspiracy that involves government contractors who work for The Donner Part; a sexual situation involving a Somalian woman who was a local translator for any echo on staff that might need her; and fraudulent activity that goes all the way up the chain of command. Chacko is a tour de force writer in a world filled with constant conflict, war, genocide and jihad. Armchair Interviews says: Engaging, interesting, this espionage thriller is a book you can't put down. Would make an excellent movie.

The Next Front

Echo Five is the third novel in the Jason Ender series. As with the first two, Less Than a Shadow and The Peacock Angel, this one is ahead of the curve in letting the reader see the inside of the "secret wars of America." Instead of danger in the Middle East, Echo Five goes south to the Horn of Africa, the area bin Laden calls "The Third Front." Here, the ferment of poverty and chaos breed terrorism in numbers. Added to it are the conflicting interests within our government, where the War on Terror has given way to a War of Turf. These conflicts seem to have resulted in the suicide of an interrogator--Echo Five. Or have they? Terrorism seems to be far in the past. Or is it? This novel lets us know all the answers in David Chacko's usual explosive way.