In the Crosshairs

June 19, 2017
Coughlin and Davis’s entertaining 10th Sniper novel (after 2016’s Long Shot) finds CIA operator Kyle Swanson in San Luis de la Paz, Mexico, attending the funeral of pal Mickey Castillo of the Mexican Marines, when a bomb explodes as the casket is being lowered into the grave. Series fans may remember that Mickey was married to Beth Ledford, who was not only a member of Kyle’s old black-ops unit Task Force Trident but a love interest of Kyle’s before she gave up on him and married Mickey. The bombing is the opening salvo in a plan hatched by a mysterious drug lord known as the Prince, whose goal is to murder Kyle and destroy the CIA. Kyle takes some time to identify the mastermind, but once the lines are drawn, Kyle shifts into high gear and shows the Prince that, for all the man’s skills, he’s just one more in a line of killers who will sooner or later be getting his butt kicked by the indomitable Kyle. Some readers might wish for a more formidable foe next time.

June 1, 2017
Marine-turned-CIA sniper Kyle Swanson is back to take on two targets at once, the Taliban and the Mexican drug cartels.Swanson's friend and sometime partner Elizabeth "Coastie" Castillo retired from duty and married a Mexican former Marine at the end of the last installment. Now she's newly widowed in a mysterious machine-gun attack, and her husband's funeral is disrupted by a grenade explosion. The evidence points to Russian agent Nikola Markovitch, a Russian spy who worked for the CIA under the name Nicky Marks but has lately become involved in an alliance between the Taliban and the cartels--both of whom have long-standing grudges against Swanson. As he chases Marks from Europe to Afghanistan, Swanson is partnered with Luke Gibson, a suspiciously gung-ho young agent whose background may not be as clean as it looks. Meanwhile Swanson looks after Coastie's rehabilitation but doesn't realize she's coming a little unhinged, avenging her husband's death with a series of unauthorized sniper attacks on drug traffickers. As usual in this series, the unresolved relationship of Swanson and Coastie provides the story's most interesting human element. Coughlin and Davis (Long Shot, 2016, etc.) have the action/revenge formula down to a science, making this another enjoyable if predictable page-turner.

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