Back Blast

Mark Greaney, a New York Times bestselling author, is best known for co-authoring Tom Clancy’s last three Jack Ryan novels and then writing two more Jack Ryan novels after Clancy’s death. Back Blast is the fifth novel in his Gray Man series, and it’s a classic CIA-espionage intrigue.  Considering that the action in Back Blast mostly takes place in and around Washington, D.C., this is a book that East Coast Don has been waiting for.

Court Gentry was the best of the CIA’s team of assassins, but for the last five years, the agency put out a kill-on-sight order against him. Gentry successfully avoided all the attempts on his life while working as an independent agent, but he finally decided he wanted to understand why he had become a target. He had never blown an assignment or made any mistakes while working for the CIA. Also, he wanted to go home, so he slipped back into the US and headed directly to D.C. with a plan to find out the basis of the plot against him.

It’s pretty clear early in the book that Gentry is really the good guy, and Denny Carmichael, the Director of the National Clandestine Service, was really the ultimate bad guy. Why was Carmichael using a team of assassins from Saudi Arabia to insure that Gentry was killed and not captured alive? Carmichael was the one with all the power and the assets against this one very talented killer. And of course, the reputation of the CIA was at stake, and Gentry did not want to totally sully the agency that had provided his identity and work for the last 20 years. Greaney provided a detailed plot with lots of believable characters who are either for Carmichael or for Gentry. Zach Hightower, who had once been Gentry’s boss was particularly interesting. There’s no love story in this book, and Greaney has avoided adding gratuitous sex. It’s just not stop action from the opening chapter. This one would definitely entertain you on a crosscountry flight.