This is a steampunk fantasy spy novel by one C.J. Casey, available for the Kindle from Amazon. I was made aware of this book through Instapundit, who these days is performing the dubious public service of touting his readers' works on his extremely popular blog. Casey claims to have grown up reading spy fiction during the Cold War, but judging from his novel, he either didn't read enough of it or what he did read was pretty awful.
Let's start with the protagonist. It's unclear whether this dwarf is a senior intel agent or just some clerk standing around when an extraction mission needed to be run; judging from some gaffes in the later chapters, I'm guessing the latter. We get a lot of words spent on how airsick he is, the inter-service rivalries within the Dwarf military, and other pointless jibber-jabber that doesn't really fill us in on the background of this little nation of dwarves that prefers home-built Coal Age technology to expensively purchased magic items. I could have lived with this if there had been a lot of swashes being buckled, tense passages about spycraft, and/or dramatic action scenes, but aside from an encounter with a hostile flying critter and the actual extraction, there's not much action to be found. What action there is, is duller than cold oatmeal.
Add in a snore-inducing debriefing, a gratuitous romantic subplot, and half a dozen loose plot threads, and what you get is sixteen chapters of foreplay and fumbling but no climax. I'm sure glad I got to read this for free through Amazon Prime, because even at $2.99 this is no deal. Not recommended.