Terminal Black

Starred review from December 24, 2012
In this standout thriller, Magson’s fourth featuring Harry Tate (after 2012’s Deception), the former MI5 agent pursues a deadly terrorist, Kassim, who comes out of the remote hills of Afghanistan in 2012 and starts killing members of the KFOR team that Harry led in Mitrovica, Kosovo, in 1999. One night back then, Harry and his men took refuge in a container depot, where that same night a local 14-year-old girl was raped and killed. Circumstantial evidence suggests the culprit was a U.N. soldier. A high-ranking U.N. security official Harry knows hires him to warn the surviving members of the team and to hunt down the assassin who’s seeking revenge for the girl’s death. Harry and computer whiz pal Rik Ferris jet around the world, always arriving just a little too late to prevent another murder. There’s plenty of action, but the thrill is following Harry’s agile mind as he figures out the who, what, where, and why of these revenge killings. Think le Carré and Deighton rather than Thor and Flynn. Agent: David Headley, DHH Literary (U.K.).

February 1, 2020
The always-reliable Magson delivers another taut espionage thriller featuring former MI5 agent Harry Tate. Forced out of the agency after being implicated in the deaths of two bystanders in the disastrous Red Station drug bust, Tate now works private-security gigs. But when he's informed by a friend in MI5 that his former colleague, computer-geek Rik Ferris, has gone missing and is feared abducted, possibly by Russian operatives, Tate knows he has to help his old friend. To do so, he travels to Belarus, where he finds another former colleague, Clare Jardine. When the pair discover that Ferris is being held and tortured for secret information he is supposed to have stumbled on during a snoop in the MI6 archives, and then learn that the group holding Ferris plans a series of cyber-attacks on the UK, they realize that, in addition to spiriting Rik out of Belarus before the Russians kill him, they must also thwart the cyber-baddies' plan. The combination of pulse-pounding suspense, delicious twists, and daring heroes makes for a highly satisfying read.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2020, American Library Association.)