Trigger Point by Tony Roth
What's It About?
“Riveting and authentic. If you thought Casino was good, you won’t be able to put this book down.” —David B.B. Helfrey, former federal prosecutor and head of the Federal Organized Crime Strike Force in Kansas City, MO and inspiration for the movie CasinoIt was during the pandemic that friends encouraged Tony Roth, entrepreneur and founder of a major eldercare business, to write the story he was destined to bring to life. And he did. 90 days later, and with more than 110,000 words and a number of fascinating characters, Trigger Point (Full Bloom Press), the debut novel in the Nicholas Ford series, was born.
Inspired by true historical events and based on reflections of the times, Trigger Point takes us deep into Contras-era Central America with an undercover CIA recruit who sacrifices everything for his country — his name, his personal life, his freedom and even his morals — just to be left for dead by his handlers.
THE DAY THE CIA SHOWED UP
While still at college, Midwestern farm boy Nicholas Ford is scouted by the CIA, who see great potential in his sharp intellect and ability to take decisive action without emotion. Soon enough, they offer the perfect assignment for him: pose as an agricultural grad student interning for the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), and do the CIA’s dirty work assassinating junta members and their supporters.
For readers unfamiliar with this period in history, the Contra war was a Reagan-era program to back counterrevolutionary forces in Nicaragua and Panama in order to topple dictatorial regimes in the region and maintain friendly allies. It was also an exceedingly “dirty war” where kidnapping, extortion, terrorism and torture were among the weapons used against the enemy and civilians alike.
It is no wonder, then, that Nick (now under the alias “Sean Smith”) finds himself confronting moral challenges about his assignment. Nick is a tortured soul, and every kill he is ordered to make weighs heavily on his conscience. To make matters worse, Nick becomes entangled in an affair with a beautiful Spanish professor while his newlywed relationship with his wife begins falling apart. We watch helplessly as he slides further and further down the slippery slope from the kind of person his father raised him to be.
Nick’s handler, though, is willing to push the limits of Nick’s sense of duty as the stakes go up and ultimately he is captured by Nicaragua’s leader, imprisoned, beaten, made to dig his own grave and wait there to die. The question now at hand is this: Is he valuable enough to save? The ending is as dramatic as it is unexpected.
A PAGE-TURNER WITH COMPLEX CHARACTERS
I thought I would read Trigger Point during a long weekend. Instead, I found I could not put the book down and devoured page after page, pushing through chapter after chapter until light turned into dark and I was on the last page of an absolutely delicious and frightening ride … but is it really the end? (No spoilers here!)
What really drew me into the story, though, were the human relationships between the fully developed characters — flaws and all — and the dramatic authenticity written against the backdrop of 1980s politics and societal expectations.
It’s hard to believe that the mesmerizing character of Nicholas Ford was created over “many glasses of scotch, blending years of bar stories, long-standing friendship in the intelligence community, and new research,” as Roth describes it. Nor that just 90 days of intense writing could gin up such a tightly plotted tale. But Roth has done just that. What’s more, he has two more in the series pipeline getting ready to explode.
