It’s refreshing to find a self-described “conservative libertarian” thriller writer bashing Russia instead of liberals. Brad Thor may be a regular contributor to Fox News and is a possible presidential candidate, but his new book is way out of sync with the current cozy-up-to-Putin right-wing zeitgeist. In “Spymaster,” his 18th Scot Harvath international espionage saga, Thor convincingly portrays Russia as a reborn Cold War-era evil empire hellbent on reconquering its former territory — first by fomenting strife among the NATO alliance and then by grabbing the Baltic states before anybody can say “Oops.”
Thor’s many fans — more than 15 million of his Harvath books have been sold — will find his former Navy SEAL hero aging a wee bit in this one. Now in his mid-40s, Harvath takes performance-enhancing “Hulk sauce” injections. He is even contemplating marriage to his longtime main squeeze, Lara, giving up his pursuit of Swedish flight attendants. As his action-hero youth recedes, Harvath also considers replacing his beloved longtime boss, Reed Carlton, as head of a private intelligence company that performs controversial deeds — abductions, black-site renditions, torture — away from, but on behalf of, a sclerotic CIA.
Carlton’s descent into a fog of Alzheimer’s is untimely, as his organization has been tasked with retrieving some tactical nukes filched from a U.S. base in Poland and spirited into Belarus. Harvath convinces U.S. President Paul Porter that Russian machinations could lead to World War III, and the operative is given pretty much free rein to thwart the Russian intelligence agency’s intentions.
Advertisement
It’s a big job saving the world, but Harvath is up to it. He and his crack team of multinational commandos track down and capture a variety of Russian baddies and then make them sing like canaries. Readers learn all the latest interrogation techniques — one specialist loosens tongues with a kind of aroma therapy — and by the time you get to the last page of “Spymaster” you’ll know the difference between a “Mark 48 belt-fed machine gun” and a “LaRue Tactical 6.5 Grendel FDE rifle with a Schmidt & Bender 5-25x56 scope with an illuminated reticle.” Though perhaps this level of detail is not surprising from Thor, who in a 2014 Shooting Illustrated article confessed: “I like guns. I like owning them, holding them, shooting them, learning about them, looking at them, cleaning them. ... My two favorite types are the ones I already own and whatever it is I can’t wait to buy.... As a thriller author, I could probably justify a lot of my purchases as ‘research,’ but I buy what I do because I love it.”
This minutia on firearms and Thor’s geopolitical musings — especially on Putin’s territorial ambitions — are often more interesting than what actually happens in the novel. His narrative prose ranges from the workmanlike to the snooze-inducing. Tree limbs cracking with ice echo “through the forest like gunfire.” Reed Carlton “had the type of mind that was always steps ahead of everyone else.” Russian soldiers in a Swedish bar stand out “like sore thumbs.”
Some of Thor’s action scenes trundle along well enough, but not so with the events where Harvath isn’t present. To sow discord and confusion within NATO, Russia stages a series of terrorist bombings across Europe with evidence pointing to a fake group. These scenes are oddly underwrought. At an Istanbul subway attack, bombs “tore through everything — flesh, bone, steel, tile, and concrete. Aboveground, buildings shook violently. Some thought it was an earthquake.”
Thor’s banality even spoils an otherwise exciting scene where Harvath and some of his cohorts skydive into Lithuanian airspace, glide over the Russian enclave of Kaliningrad, then parachute into a pasture at night. The best line Thor can come up with for Harvath as he soars across the inky sky is: “There was absolutely no other feeling in the world like it.”
Advertisement
The Kaliningrad raid in the final section of the novel in fact turns out well overall, once Harvath and his brave crew fight off a slew of armed Russians. By now you know that in the end things will probably be okay, because, in a thriller written by a member of the NRA, of course the answer to bad guys with guns is good guys with guns.
In a last-page twist — it’s actually the only surprise in the entire book — a betrayal is revealed that feels less like a logical result of anything that has come before than a marketing tease for Scot Harvath thriller No. 19. Fans should be able to preorder the book soon enough.
Richard Lipezwrites the Don Strachey PI novels under the name Richard Stevenson.
Read more:
17 thrillers and mysteries worth toting to the beach
For the inside dope on how the CIA works, ‘The Quantum Spy’ can’t be beat
SPYMASTER
By Brad Thor
Emily Bestler Books/Atria. 327 pages. $27.99
ncG1vNJzZmivp6x7uK3SoaCnn6Sku7G70q1lnKedZLKvwMSrq5qhnqKyr8COm6aoo6NkvLbA0qmmpJ2eYrCwutKeqa%2BZpJ7DpnnBq5idZaSdvLN505qinqtdlrauecCtZKuto6i2onnIp2ShoaNiuaLAxKyrZqyYp7atuMSrZmtoYW18cYKOa29oaJZmgqZ%2Fj3FkcHBobXpyfcRxZJqdlZp6dbCPbZpxmZNrfnaEvqyrqKqpY7W1ucs%3D