In this third installment of the Bill Lane adventures, the hero finds himself tracking a missing submarine. A Russian Romeo-class submarine was reportedly sunk in the Barents Sea, a radioactive graveyard of old vessels. However, American intelligence sources discover that the sinking was faked, and in reality the sub may be sold to an unfriendly faction in Africa. With a small crew of renegades hoping to get rich quick, the submarine may actually be hiding in the English Channel.

Enter Bill Lane, the clever and handsome expert from the NSA’s Russian Division. Posing as a Cape Town businessman by the name of Vandermeer, Lane approaches a corrupt Russian official about buying the missing submarine. From here, the story moves to London, where Lane continues to confirm the sub’s whereabouts and tries to apprehend both the submarine and the Russian bad guys.

In London, Bill Lane’s love interest, Frances Shipley, conveniently works for British Intelligence. Their relationship has been clouded since a skilled assassin, Valeri Yernin, vowed to kill them both in a previous adventure. Yernin knows that Lane’s love for Frances is his weak spot, thus his Achilles’ Heel. (OK, that part makes sense. But why then, in a book about a missing submarine, is a fighter plane prominently featured on the cover?)

Yernin is so evil that he kills Frances’ elderly uncle and his loyal servant just to get to Frances and Bill. And there is the required ugly and bloody shootout at his secluded home on the Thames. But in reading this story, it is easy to see that Frances and Bill aren’t too bright for intelligence officers.

When posing as Vandermeer, Lane is recognized by both a Russian agent and a hotel waiter. And even though a very skilled and vengeful assassin is after her, Frances continues to drive the same Range Rover and stay at her own home. She even leaves her friendly housekeeper to stay there alone -- without using the security system! Of course the “old dear” is brutally murdered and Frances kidnapped -- all the better for Lane to rescue her and seek his revenge from Lernin.

The story is irritatingly told in micro-chapters, often less than a page in length. As Flannery jumps around from London to Zurich to the submarine and naval bases, the plot thinly unravels. Somehow the dapper Lane, with his unexplained charm, is able to get both the President’s and Prime Minister’s blessings to do almost anything he wants. When two pilots die in an attempt to locate the missing sub, Lane’s whining response: “I wouldn’t have asked them if I hadn’t thought it was important.”

The plot also involves illegal business dealings among the Russian Mafia, Cuban terrorists, and radioactivity. (The plotline with the radiation scare is actually the most clever.) But Flannery seems to be oblivious to his characters’ lack of charm, and this sabotages the story. For example, a recurring threat between Lane and a British officer, who also happens to be a rival for Frances’ attention, involves “cutting you off at the legs and pissing on the bloody stumps.”

Flannery’s heroes are sort of like Dirty Harry in Armani and Gucci, but without the charm. Consequently, Achilles’ Heel comes off as a very flat-footed attempt at the action-suspense genre.

--Martha Moore