The Midnight House

December 7, 2009
After saving New York City in 2009's The Silent Man
, CIA agent John Wells, the hero of bestseller Berenson's exceptional espionage series, retreats to rural New Hampshire in his compelling fourth outing. He hikes and thinks, accompanied only by his dog, Tonka, but soon enough, John hears from Ellis Shafer, “his sort-of boss at the agency,” who calls him back to Washington, D.C., for a new assignment. An unknown assassin is targeting members of Task Force 673, a now-disbanded secret unit whose job was interrogating terrorists, in particular “high-value detainees,” by any necessary means. Five of the 10-person squad are missing or dead, with the rest in mortal danger. In his pursuit of the killer, John encounters all manner of political intrigue, including convoluted plots set in motion by agency chiefs vying for control of America's security apparatus, who rely on low-level field spies to carry out their various and bloody plans.

May 3, 2010
George Guidall’s no-nonsense tough guy growl adds a sense of hard-boiled reality to this fourth adventure featuring coolly efficient CIA agent John Wells. Working with his considerably more emotional associate, Ellis Shafer, Wells investigates the assassinations of interrogation team members working on a group of jihadists at a secret location known as the Midnight House. Berenson switches from Wells’s and Shafer’s difficult and perilous search, which takes the former to and from Cairo, to a sequence of flashbacks involving the team members going about their grim job at the House. The result is a clever mix of detective story and spy thriller, with Guidall handling the chronological and genre shifts as smoothly and efficiently as he does the changes in accents. A Putnam hardcover (Reviews, Dec. 7).

Once upon a recent time there was a secret location in Poland where suspected terrorists were "questioned." Now the former captors are being hunted down and killed; it's up to CIA operative John Wells to find out by whom. George Guidall's voice is the perfect vehicle for this often-horrifying story. It somehow manages to be soothing though it can morph to modes of outrage, conversation, or explanation. Conversations are animated; the ones involving torturer and prisoner are especially affecting. One senses that the occasional Arabic is perfectly pronounced; at any rate, it flows. Guidall excels at villains' voices, but you may not spot the killer here. J.B.G. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award (c) AudioFile 2010, Portland, Maine