Mission Critical

March 1, 2019
Bad guys galore live and die in this latest entry in the Gray Man series (Agent in Place, 2018, etc.).Courtland Gentry--code-named Violator --is a freelance assassin on contract with the CIA. His handler, series regular Suzanne Brewer, is often frustrated with his propensity to act alone. "Being a team player had been fun while it lasted," Violator muses at one point, "but it was time to go off mission." So Brewer is tempted to take drastic action, but he's hardly her only problem. Zoya Zakharova is a former Russian spy code-named Anthem who's flipped to the West and is "an equally insubordinate singleton." The threat they all have to worry about is definitely a team player. She is Won Jang-Mi, aka Janice Won, a West-hating North Korean scientist specializing in pneumonic plague and hemorrhagic fever. Russians are behind a plot for Won to unleash a biological attack on the West, and she has a 10-week deadline to get it done. Meanwhile, Zakharova's father, Feodor Zakharov, now lives in the West under the alias David Mars, and each believes the other is dead. Father and daughter working passionately on opposite sides--imagine the coming family reunion! This novel is vintage Greaney, with a tight plot, a ticking clock, and a sympathetic antihero. Violator is "not psyched at all about killing multiple carloads of men," but he loses no sleep over it, either. The action is almost nonstop, with nice twists right to the end. There are also small doses of humor, as when tough guy Zack Hightower whines about his CIA code name, Romantic. The characters are by and large plucked from central casting, but they suit the story's needs well enough.This is good, Clancy-esque entertainment. May the evildoers of the world have nightmares that Violator becomes a real person.

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Starred review from February 1, 2019
The latest in the Gray Man series continues to demonstrate why Greaney belongs in the upper echelon of special-ops thriller authors. Court Gentry, the Gray Man, who works covertly for the CIA, is on board a Company transport plane when a security team arrives with a hooded man and forces Court to sit on the opposite side of the plane. Who is this mysterious man? When the plane lands in the UK, it is ambushed, all of the passengers (except Court, who escapes) are shot, and the man with the hood is abducted. After surviving the attack, Court is tasked with tracking the team of attackers. To complicate matters further, a CIA safe house in the States is also attacked, with the apparent objective of eliminating a new asset, Zoya Zakharova, someone whom Court cares about deeply. Let the chaos begin, as the Gray Man sets about exacting his no-holds-barred brand of justice. The tension in this adrenaline-fueled thriller, the eighth in the series, never lets up for more than 500 pages. Remarkably, each Gray Man novel is better than the ones that came before.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2019, American Library Association.)

September 1, 2018

Brought aboard Court Gentry's flight on a CIA transport, a hooded man bound for a joint CIA/MI6 interrogation in England is hustled away by a group of attackers when the plane lands, with Gentry--the only man left standing--sent after them. Next in the "Gray Man" series, which has seen big sales increases for each of the last three entries.

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