Rogue

July 30, 2012
This series opener from Sullivan (Triple Cross), a loud, brawny festival of action, introduces Robin Monarch, a modern-day Robin Hood who grew up in a poor neighborhood of Buenos Aires, Argentina, and uses his CIA training to foil evil international forces while skimming the proceeds for his pet humanitarian projects. When Monarch gets on the trail of a missing military weapon that vaporizes its targets rather than blows them up, he discovers that two competing Russian gangsters both want the ray gun, as does his former boss, CIA special ops chief Jack Slattery. Monarch tracks the weapon throughout Europe before finding it stashed in the ruins of an old Ottoman Empire fortress in Moldova. Rest assured, Monarch won’t turn it over to the highest bidder. This thriller provides a nice adrenaline rush, even if Monarch follows in a long line of tough action heroes who are quick thinking, quick acting, and always ready with a clever line of dialogue. Agent: Meg Ruley, Jane Rotrosen Agency.

September 1, 2012
Hide the good china: Sullivan (Triple Cross, 2009, etc.) launches a new series with even more helter-skelter action than his stratospheric average. After Robin Monarch quit the CIA when he realized that his mission to tap into an Al-Qaida computer for information about what turned out to be the sinister Green Fields project had been hopelessly corrupted, he went back to his roots. For Robin, orphaned young in Buenos Aires and raised by a community of thieves, that meant stealing stuff. Now, Constantine Belos, a pillar of the Russian Mafia who's been following Robin's career, wants him to find and steal a nuclear trigger before Belos' Mafia rival, Omak, can purchase it from weapons dealer Boris Koporski, who moonlights, or daylights, as the President of Transdniestra. When Robin politely declines Belos' offer of $5 million for the trigger, Belos detains his girlfriend, London editor Lacey Wentworth, and demands that Robin deliver the device for free within the next two weeks. Stung into action, Robin reassembles the team of forgettable professionals who worked with him on Green Fields and goes hunting for the trigger. But the team's success in tracking it down is only the prelude to an endless series of bullet-laced confrontations, betrayals and rounds of torture that make it clear that in Robin's world, even an offer you can't refuse can always be renegotiated. The corruption, you'll be happy to know, leads from the Mafia to the very highest levels of the CIA and the U.S. Senate. Makes you wonder. Sullivan, who most recently co-authored Private Games (2012) with James Patterson, has long since mastered the art of purging every bit of scenic or psychological interest from his exercises in can-you-top-this plotting. The closest analogies are summer movies from Entrapment to the Mission: Impossible franchise.

COPYRIGHT(2012) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

September 15, 2012
Robin Monarch is the most hunted man in the world. His parents, an American cat burglar and a con man from Argentina, are killed when he is just 13, forcing him to live in the most dangerous slum in Buenos Aires. He joins the Brotherhood of Thieves, learns their 18-rule code of conduct, and survives, with the help of a nun. Eventually, Monarch becomes one of the CIA's top operatives and is sent on a mission to derail an al-Qaeda plot called Green Fields. But when he discovers that Green Fields is something else entirelyand that his superiors are corrupthe goes rogue, with arms dealers, Russian mobsters, and his own government all on his tail. This lightning-fast read brings to mind Robert Ludlum and Mission Impossibleand will definitely appeal to adrenalin junkiesbut beyond the breakneck pacing, it comes up short, both in character development and believability. Sullivan undoubtedly learned pacing and the art of the short chapter as coauthor of James Patterson's Private Games.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2012, American Library Association.)