Review: Raider by M.L. Buchman

Raider Format: eARC
Source: author
Formats available: paperback, ebook, audiobook
Genres: espionage, technothriller, thriller
Series: Miranda Chase NTSB #5
Pages: 360
Published by Buchman Bookworks on January 26, 2021
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org
Goodreads

Miranda Chase—the heroine you didn’t expect. Fighting the battles no one else could win.
The US Army’s brand-new S-97 Raider reconnaissance helicopter goes down during final acceptance testing — hard. Cause: a failure, or the latest in a series of cyberattacks by Turkey.
Miranda Chase, an autistic air-crash genius, and her team of NTSB investigators tackle the challenge. They must find the flaw, save the Vice President, and stop the US being forced into the next war in the Middle East. And they have to do it now!

My Review:

There are several ways to approach Raider and the entire Miranda Chase series – and they all work because the series is just so damn good.

Miranda Chase is a savant when it comes to figuring out the cause of aircraft crashes, no matter how often the only way to solve the puzzle is to start from the old Sherlock Holmes aphorism that goes, “When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.”

So many of Miranda and her team’s solutions veer into the airspace of very improbable indeed, right up to the point where they prove, yet again, that improbability happens – and that they are the best team in the world at figuring it out.

And speaking of the team, another way of approaching this series is as a brilliant exercise in “competence porn”. Miranda and her team are the very best at what they do. Not just Miranda with her bone-deep desire to prevent the kind of crash that killed her parents, combined with the extreme focus on the task accompanied by a complete lack of ability to deal with social cues that is part of her autism spectrum disorder.

But it’s also about the team that she has gathered around her, because they are ALL the best at what they do, even if, as happens to both long-term team member and human factors specialist Mike and newcomer and helicopter specialist Andi, more than occasionally individual team members wonder what it is that they, personally are bringing to Miranda’s table.

Even the best of the best get slapped with impostor syndrome now and again.

Last but not least, for those who experience an occasional sense of nostalgia for the big, meaty, complicated spy games and government con games of the late Tom Clancy , the Miranda Chase series will definitely remind such readers of the internecine government warfare that was at the heart of so many of Clancy’s best – without the heft. (His later books did get kind of doorstoppy.)

Because this adventure, like ALL of Miranda’s adventures, combines plane crashes, government skullduggery, political one-upmanship (also one-upwomanship), brinkmanship that almost but not quite flies over that brink, with spy games and digital warfare on each and every side.

And it’s a thrill-a-minute ride every step of the way.

Escape Rating A: The Miranda Chase series just keeps getting better and better. I’m not the only reviewer saying it, but it bears repeating, so I’m repeating it. The series began in late 2019 with Drone and it has been just the perfect antidote to everything that went wrong in 2020. It features fascinating people solving convoluted problems with the occasional help and just as frequent stonewalling by a government that seems torn between getting shit done and turning on itself.

But competence and capability always triumph in this series, no matter what the odds or who is stacking them up.

This entry in the series ups the ante both in the solution to the series of crashes they are investigating and in their hair-raising escape from the results of that investigation – when it turns out they desperately need to escape a possibly hostile country with the Vice-President, the top-secret parts of Air Force Two, 60-something nuclear warheads and themselves intact while someone back in DC hacks that same country’s cyber warfare capability. It’s all in a day’s work – actually several almost totally sleepless days’ work – for Miranda and Co.

The other fascinating part of this entry in the series, in addition to the usual air crashes and spy games, is that the team has finally become a five-man band with the introduction of Captain Andrea (Andi) Wu, a helicopter pilot and not-fully-trained NTSB agent who was honorably discharged from the Night Stalkers with PTSD after her copilot took a grenade and saved her life and her helicopter. A helicopter that has just gone down in a mysterious crash.

Andi needs a purpose. Miranda and her team need an expert in all things helicopter, as well as someone who can speak fluent “soldier” when their investigation takes them to military bases, as it frequently does.

As this story winds its way from Denali to Groom Lake to Incirlik Air Base, Andi has to pull herself together, make a place for herself on the already tight-knit team, and help solve the puzzle of what happened to the experimental helicopter that she and her partner used to fly in a crash that shouldn’t have happened but absolutely did.

Raider is a spy story. And a military story. A puzzle-solving mystery. It’s Andi’s story. And especially and always it’s Miranda’s story – even if she never sees herself at the center of anything except an investigation.

This series is always exciting, nail-biting, and utterly marvelous. It can be read in any order but it’s especially wonderful if you start at the very beginning with Drone. Be prepared for Miranda and her team to take you on one wild ride after another.

Buckle up! Miranda Chase will be back in March in Chinook.

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