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.

January 1, 2010
Superspy and serial country-saver John Wells (The Silent Man, 2009, etc.) seeks to uncover the truth about a string of murdered operatives from a top-secret unit.

Last seen stopping an Islamist plot to detonate a nuclear device in Washington, D.C., CIA agent Wells is called back to duty from a rest period in New Hampshire by his grouchy but loveable Agency handler Ellis Shafer. It seems CIA head Vincent Duto, with whom Wells has repeatedly butted heads, wants them to look into a string of suspicious deaths. The victims are all veterans of Task Force 673, which operated out of a covert detention facility in Poland. The two start poking around, Wells in Egypt disguised as a Kuwaiti activist, Shafer on the domestic front. Eventually, they begin to suspect that not only might a string of former captives want the members of 673 dead, but so too might some in the U.S. intelligence establishment who have reason to fear the consequences if the truth about what 673 was up to comes to light. The stakes are much lower than Berenson's usual here—no plot to detonate a major U.S. city—but the novel as a whole and Wells' character in particular benefit from the additional breathing room. Any fictional CIA agent would do whatever it takes to prevent a known terrorist attack, but here we see how far Wells is willing to go to discover the truth for its own sake. After all, a man can only save the country from destruction so many times before he begins to look like a character in a comic book.

A superbly crafted spy thriller that doubles as a gripping mystery; the reader has no idea who the killer is until Wells figures it out.

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Starred review from January 15, 2010
Berenson's ("The Faithful Spy") latest ingeniously plotted and fast-paced story again offers superspy John Wells, who is called upon by shifty CIA superiors to investigate the systematic murders of members of a now-disbanded supersecret interrogation team known as the Midnight House. Our well-equipped hero deduces that both the dead interrogators and agency executives harbored an extraordinarily dangerous political secret as well as participated in various forms of financial corruption. The story features emotionally affecting and high-action scenes in vividly portrayed settings; memorable characters contribute to the reader's comprehension of how the CIA's overseas "rendition" program may have been of enormous benefit to national security but also grossly immoral and personally destructive to its participants, terror suspects and interrogators alike. VERDICT Arguably Berenson's best thriller yet, this outstanding novel stands on the top rung of commercial spy fiction. [See Prepub Alert, "LJ" 10/1/09.]Jonathan Pearce, California State Univ. at Stanislaus, Stockton

Copyright 2010 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

January 1, 2010
Former members of a top-secret, joint CIA-army team of interrogators at a secret prison in Poland, Task Force 673, are dying, and Agent John Wells is recalled from self-imposed exile to find out why. The director of Central Intelligence (DCI) tells Wells that the intel derived by 673 was stovepiped directly to the Pentagon; the man who knows what 673 learned is now director of National Intelligence, the nominal boss of the DCI. In Cairo, posing as a Kuwaiti, Wells satisfies himself that Islamist terrorists arent behind the deaths, and he returns to the U.S. to look for the killers. Berenson tells a fast-paced and riveting tale that ranges from derring-do in Pakistan and Cairo, to plodding gumshoe detection in L.A. and New Orleans, to assassination in San Francisco, and to bureaucratic trench warfare in Washington, D.C. His characters are either deftly sketched or fully realized. His writing is succinct, with dashes of cynical humor. But the books linchpin is decisions made by the U.S. after 9/11decisions that seem to be sparking a flurry of outstanding espionage novels, with Berensons work in the forefront.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2010, American Library Association.)