Michael Martinez begins the conclusion to Majestic 12, his Spies and Superpowers series with nothing less than the death of Joseph Stalin. This obviously opens up a vacuum in the Soviet Union with a few players vying for power and no crystal clear successor. However, one of those successors is Laverentiy Beria, a man with powers of his own. The United States, is of course, invested in what happens next since the Soviet Union is their chief national antagonist. Eisenhower is now the US President and as an inheritor of the office, he is at a bit of a remove from the Majestic 12 program. Martinez is playing real history here, there was a power vacuum when Stalin died in 1953 and Beria was a real person who was as evil as Stalin or even some of the Nazis.
Josef Stalin is dead. In the aftermath, the Soviet Union is thrown into crisis, giving former secret police chief Laverentiy Beria exactly the opening he needs. Beria’s plan is to secretly place his country’s Variants—ordinary people mysteriously embued with strange, superhuman powers—into the very highest levels of leadership, where he can use them to stage a government coup and seize control of the USSR.
America’s response comes from its intelligence communities, including the American Variants recruited for the top-secret MAJESTIC-12 program, who are suddenly thrown into their most dangerous and important assignment yet. From the halls of the Kremlin to the battlefields of Korea, superpowered covert agents face off to determine the future of the planet—a future their very existence may ultimately threaten.
The reality of the political situation comes across very well researched, which gives more believability to the fictional elements of the story. More importantly, Martinez is able to inhabit a great deal of humanity and empathy in his characters. Having fully established the primary players in the saga over the course of the first two novels of the trilogy, I felt I knew these characters pretty well. So when, for example, Calvin is asked to give little to no notice to his family that he will be leaving them for an assignment, the subtlety of his pain and uncertainty felt genuine.
There are still trust issues with some members of the Majestic team. With the rich political nature of the book and Martinez playing so well off of the tense political climate of the time, there are some twists and turns throughout the narrative. Along those lines, Martinez is not willing to let these characters settle into their powers so easily. Like the most famous of comic book superheroes (think Spider-Man’s waning powers and doubt), his characters go through a period of unpredictability with their own powers. Not surprising since the source of the Variants’s powers is still largely a mystery.
There is the looming threat of war all over the place in the novel, from barely leaving the shadow of World War II, to the political Cold War, to the actual Korean War, the tension is extremely high. Characters aren’t safe from the effects of being operatives in the war either. As one might expect in a story taking place in war, some characters are captured and we get to see something of the enemy’s side of the conflict. It becomes clear that even the enemies are facing a great deal of their own inner turmoil, from dealing with their own Variants to the effect of the enemy’s uncertain political climate.
Martinez brings the novel, and series, to an exciting conclusion with the characters pulling the narrative along very strongly. There is a very clean break for this trilogy, effectively ending the story begun in MJ-12: Inception. However, Martinez is a smart enough writer that there are crumbs to follow and perhaps a backdoor for more stories about these characters if he ever chooses. I really liked that he provided a definitive beginning, middle, and end to the story but wouldn’t say no to something more in this world. There’s nary a wasted word, plot movement, or detail throughout the trilogy.
Whenever there’s a big MacGuffin or something mysterious as the cause of some of the more fantastical elements a story, the revelation of that mystery can potentially affect how the series/story as a whole is judged. While I wasn’t quite expecting the revelation to be what it was, in fact I probably mentally said to myself, “Sure, I suppose that’s as good an explanation as any.” However, because of how well Martinez constructed the world and created these characters, that revelation didn’t really raise or lower the series for me. In other words, I liked just about everything he poured into this series and can unflinchingly recommend it.
I think the publisher would be wise to bind these three books together in an omnibus volume.
Recommended
© 2019 Rob H. Bedford
September 2018 | Night Shade Books
Mass Market Paperback | 304 Pages
https://michaeljmartinez.net/
Sample: https://michaeljmartinez.net/writing/majestic/mj-12-endgame
Review copy courtesy of the publisher
