MISSION CRITICAL

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.