Review: Occasion... for Disaster

Occasion... for Disaster by Mark Phillips
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The third in a trilogy, I discovered after I'd started it (I'd read the first, but not the second, something I am now rectifying).

The premise is that lots of organizations - the US government, but also business, unions and even organized crime - are suddenly having issues with people making mistakes, resigning, getting arrested, or even falling ill or dying, and the whole system is collapsing as a result. Nor is it confined to the US; it's worldwide. The protagonist, an FBI officer, has his focus on the US, though, and finally tracks down the unlikely culprits and their surprising motivation. It reminded me of the OSS sabotage handbook that recommended lots of small acts of inefficiency as a way to bring a system to its knees (a lesson for us all).

It's not quite as comedic as the first book, but still has some beautifully phrased imagery and a decent mystery for the protagonist to solve, one which baffled him (and also me) until almost to the end. His power of premonition is used as a little bit of a shortcut sometimes, but mostly he works for his conclusions, and the clues are right out where the reader can see them but conveyed in a way that, for me, didn't tip me off.

While the main female character never gets any depth to speak of, and is not on stage very much, the protagonist does end up respecting her and not just regarding her as a piece of meat. That's significant; one half of the pseudonym Mark Phillips was Randall Garrett, notorious in his day (his Wikipedia entry says) for behaving badly to women at conventions (to the point that, these days, even the more conservative cons would ban him). I had my hesitations about reading a book co-authored by someone like that, but given that he's dead and even his estate won't get any money from me because I picked it up free on Project Gutenberg, and if I refused to read books by authors who behaved in ways I don't approve of I wouldn't have much left to read, I went ahead and read it anyway.

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