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Summary
Summary
Undercover work in Afghanistan and Pakistan, the attack on the United States, the Chinese plot that could have led to war - all this has exhausted CIA agent John Wells. But Wells has no time to dwell on his nightmares. He has made enemies, and the world won't stay quiet for long. Still, Wells is not prepared for what is about to happen. He and his fiancee, Jennifer Exley, are driving in to work when traffic comes to a standstill - accidents on both bridges leading into Washington. Wells has a bad feeling - and it gets worse when he spots a red motorcycle zooming up between cars toward him. Before the day is over, several people will be dead or severely injured - Exley among them. And Wells will be a man possessed.
"Berenson earns his reader's suspension of disbelief with a relentless plot and many expertly-wrought white-knuckle thrills along the way." - Kirkus Reviews.
"Fast and furious ... a welcome addition to an excellent series." - Publishers Weekly
Author Notes
Alex Berenson was born on January 6, 1973. He graduated from Yale University in 1994 with degrees in history and economics. After college, he became a reporter for the Denver Post. In 1996, he became one of the first employees at TheStreet.com, the financial news website. In 1999, he became a reporter for The New York Times. While there he covered topics ranging from the occupation of Iraq to the flooding of New Orleans to the financial crimes of Bernie Madoff. He left the Times in 2010 to concentrate on writing fiction, but he occasionally contributes to the newspaper.
His first book, The Faithful Spy, won the 2007 Edgar Award for Best First Novel. His other works include The John Wells series and the nonfiction books The Number and The Prisoner.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Bestseller Berenson's well-plotted and thoughtful third thriller to feature CIA agent John Wells (after The Ghost War) finds Wells and his fellow CIA agent and fiancee, Jenny Exley, living happily together in Washington, D.C., content to devote themselves to fighting the forces of evil. One morning, while stuck in traffic on their way to CIA headquarters, men on motorcycles attack them in their minivan. Exley suffers a serious gunshot injury in an act of revenge by minions of Pierre Kowalski, an enemy from an earlier book. Meanwhile, jihadists bent on destroying America steal two small atomic bombs. These extremely clever villains, per Berenson's style, aren't mad dog idiots but credible characters with reasons, at least from their own perspective, to be doing the great evil they're planning. Fast and furious when it needs to be, this is a welcome addition to an excellent series. Berenson won an Edgar for his first novel, The Faithful Spy. (Feb.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Kirkus Review
CIA superagent John Wells (The Ghost War, 2008, etc.) returns in another well-crafted thriller. When his people botch a hit on Wells, ruthless international weapons dealer Pierre Kowalski knows he needs to think fast of something valuable to trade for his skin. Wells isn't one to let something like this slide, especially since his fiance Jennifer Exley was caught in the crossfire. In exchange for a truce, Kowalski decides to let Wells in on a rumor that's been making the rounds lately, something about an unspecified quantity of highly enriched uranium that the Russians seem to have lost. Wells, who already has had some considerable success when it comes to saving the country from grave national threats, takes the bait. Soon he and the rest of the federal government are scrambling to find out who has the uranium, how much they have and what they're planning on doing with it. You could arch your eyebrows at the hero's God-like hand-to-hand combat abilities, or the circumstances that conspire to place the same agent between the United States and total ruin more than once in the span of a few short years. It might be considered overkill that Wells is lustily ogled by every female in the book, from the supermodel to the tanning-booth attendant. And low groans are definitely in order for the tenuous clue that leads him to the book's climactic conclusion. But please groan quietly, so as not to spoil everyone's fun. Berenson earns his reader's suspension of disbelief with a relentless plot and many expertly wrought white-knuckle thrills along the way. Action-packed, thrilling and just credible enough. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
John Wells saves the world for the third time in as many books, but we wouldn't have it any other way. Islamist jihadists manage to steal some fissionable material out of a remote Russian weapons depot, intending to build a crude atom bomb to unleash on the great Satan. Meanwhile, Wells' love interest is nearly killed by an old enemy, sending our dour, driven hero eastward on a one-man mission of vengeance, even as the terrorists head steadily westward with their awful freight. Wells has lost some of his promise as a devout Muslim action hero (The Faithful Spy, 2006), an intriguing premise completely jettisoned here. But while Wells has grown two-dimensional, the supporting cast of holy warriors and their reluctant assistants (such as Gregor, a pathetically hulking weak link on the weapons depot's payroll) are fleshed out and motivated far more than your typical baddies. Oddly enough, it is the terrorists' desperate nuclear caper, plausibly detailed and convincingly problematic, that keeps the reader caring, and guessing, until the end and that keeps this series in the first rank of international thrillers.--Wright, David Copyright 2009 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
A NOVEL can, and should, do many things, but a thriller need do only one. If it thrills, it succeeds, and if it does not, no matter how well it does everything else, it fails. Alex Berenson's third novel, "The Silent Man," succeeds in seizing the attention from the start and never letting go until the end. Like most thrillers, "The Silent Man" is more concerned with how and where than who or why. The tale involves the theft of Russian nuclear warheads to be detonated in Washington during the State of the Union address, in an effort to wipe out the government and possibly draw the United States into war with Medvedev's Russia. Berenson, a New York Times reporter, deftly describes the weapons heist, detailing with enjoyable precision the Russian security system and the ingenuity with which it is circumvented. His explanation of how the warheads will work has the feel of real science, simultaneously fascinating and mind-numbing. As we know from James Bond and Jack Bauer - that icon of the Cheney era - a thriller hero can be over the top, but he can never be silly without endangering the story's spell. Berenson's hero, John Wells, isn't quite silly, but he sometimes comes across as a media cliché instead of a character lifted from life or invented from whole cloth. As readers of Berenson's earlier thrillers will remember, Wells spent nearly a decade infiltrating Al Qaeda, even converting to Islam; then, with the help of his C.I.A. colleague (and fiancée) Jennifer Exley, he stopped a Qaeda attack on New York. "More recently he and Exley had helped avert war between the United States and China," Berenson writes in a bit of exposition that sounds like a "Previously on '24' . . ." voice-over. "The missions had saved untold lives." Of course, Wells is seen by the C.I.A. director as "arrogant, untouchable, a loose cannon." A loner and a rogue, he has the requisite cool scar but is "never more endearing" than when he's "acting like a big kid." He has responsibility issues with Exley, whose name leads to such unfortunate phrases as "Exley's exhusband." The comic book quality of all this is emphasized by Berenson's use of sound effects: "The pistol jerked twice in succession, crack-crack." The baddies here are mostly Middle Eastern, and their leader, Yusuf (whose "fingers were as weightless as the devil's"), has a touch of true evil about him. They are all motivated by a thirst to avenge various injustices perpetrated on their loved ones. One villain harbors doubts, however, creating a nice secondary level of suspense - will he betray his colleagues or himself? One of the pleasures of thrillers is that they often take you to distant locales. Occasionally, Berenson evokes a sense of place quite well, as in this description of the Moscow Metro: "The subway cars were Soviet-era, made of blue corrugated steel with big windows, and they emerged from the tunnels with a pressurized whoosh as if they were powered by air and not electricity." Too often, though, his descriptions are bland and featureless: "The city hall was a reminder of Hamburg's prosperity, a broad building with a clock tower at its center." And sometimes they shade into the unintentionally hilarious - the Black Sea is "a famously dank waterway"? Yet none of these drawbacks do much to slow the locomotive of the plot, which keeps hurtling along until Wells brings it to a neat and violent end. At his best, Berenson puts the genre through its paces; at his worst, he's just generic. Richard Lourie's most recent novel, "A Hatred for Tulips," has been issued in paperback as "Joop: A Novel of Anne Frank."
Library Journal Review
Verdict: Berenson's third John Wells espionage novel (after The Faithful Spy and The Ghost War) is a swift and gripping read reminiscent of David Stone's thrillers but without the graphic violence. Recommended for all public libraries. [See Prepub Alert, LJ 10/1/08.] Background: After a terrorist attack in Washington, DC, leaves several people dead and Wells's fiancee severely wounded, the CIA agent travels to Russia on a private mission that morphs from destroying his nemesis into saving the world. Readers familiar with the characters from the series will especially enjoy the complex-if occasionally fanciful-plot involving stolen Russian weapons, international arms transactions, and a terrorist scheme to construct and detonate a nuclear bomb in the United States.-Jonathan Pearce, California State Univ. Stanislaus, Stockton, CA (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.