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Summary
Summary
John Wells may have left the CIA, but it hasn't left him. A mysterious call brings a surprise meeting with the aging monarch of Saudi Arabia, King Abdullah. His kingdom is on a precipice, powerful factions are plotting against him, and his family is in danger. He's been told he can trust Wells. Reluctantly, and with the secret blessing of the CIA, Wells goes undercover. But the more he learns, the more complicated things become...
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 (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Those who can't get enough post-9/11 novels about a maverick intelligence operative trying to foil yet another Islamic terrorist group bent on cataclysmic mayhem will welcome Berenson's fifth thriller featuring John Wells (after The Midnight House). No longer with the CIA, Wells flies to France to meet a prospective employer, who turns out to be Saudi Arabia's king, Abdullah bin Abdul-Aziz. The king fears that his brother Saaed, the Saudi defense minister, is plotting against him to insure that Saaed's 48-year-old son, Mansour, succeeds to the throne. Saaed's scheming has extended to supporting the gunmen who just shot up a bar in Bahrain popular with Americans. Unable to trust his own people, the monarch asks Wells to find out who's behind the terrorists, a hazardous mission that action-hero Wells readily accepts. The plot unfolds along predictable lines in a story arc that Tom Clancy readers or viewers of TV's 24 will find old hat. (Feb.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
John Wells is working freelance, which means that he can choose the jobs he wants to do. It also means that he has to operate without the resources and sanction of the CIA. Here he works for Saudi Arabia's aging King Abdullah, whose brother Saeed conspires against him and, by funding terrorists, has unwittingly set the stage for the biggest war yet in the Middle East. Wells and his partner, Brett Gaffan, chase clues in Lebanon and Saudi Arabia as the terrorists pull off two stunning attacks, leaving diplomatic relations strained to the breaking point. Wells isn't as fascinating as he was in his debut, The Faithful Spy (2006), when undercover work chasing Osama bin Laden had led him to embrace Islam. Now his Muslim faith is perfunctory, his command of Arabic mostly a navigational tool. (Indeed, despite Berenson's obvious respect for realism, several solutions are arrived at too easily.) But Berenson is still so skillful at setting spycraft against plausible political scenarios, so terrific at creating tension, that he's top-flight even when he's not quite at the top of his game.--Graff, Keir Copyright 2010 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
ASK not what John Wells can do for your country. Seriously, don't ask. Even if you found this former C.I.A. operative in a chatty mood, his answers might leave you feeling uneasy. He's the sort of guy who borrows civilians' cars with all the hesitation of a teenage shoplifter, who'll club the skull of a useful drug dealer who's already comfortably trussed in the back of an Econoline. When a beefy thug on a pier in Cyprus dismisses him with an ostentatious yawn, Wells quickly takes him to task, dumping him into Nicosia's oily harbor. And these are just the tales he could actually tell. The ones he couldn't - now those are scary. A 210-pound, Montana-raised, one-man Team America, Wells has already completed four missions dreamed up by the novelist Alex Berenson. In his fifth, "The Secret Soldier," Wells and an intrepid former Special Ops soldier take on a freelance assignment financed by steady streams of million-dollar Saudi paychecks. Wells must defuse an impending war on Arabian soil between the United States and the House of Saud, instigated by a terrorist group so shadowy that its attacks on soft targets around the Persian Gulf perplex even Al Qaeda. Given this year of riot and revolution in Cairo, Tunis and Sana, it's frighteningly easy to believe Berenson's terrifying chain of events in Riyadh, Jeddah and Mecca. But Berenson, a former reporter for The New York Times, confounds traditional fantasies of patriotism and vengeance. His hero has an unfortunate knack for arriving at the scene just after the nick of time. Wells is also a conflicted Islamic convert (although Berenson uses this detail mostly as a narrative ornament - we don't even see Wells pray until half-way through the book). "The Secret Soldier" luxuriates in violence, positively raging with Tarantino-style carnage. It's rare to go more than a few pages without encountering a sickening passage like this: "Shrapnel tore open his face and neck, and one jagged piece chopped through his skull and cut into the arteries around his brain, causing massive internal bleeding. He died, but not soon enough." But in the spirit of his lapsed C.I.A. spook, Berenson doesn't fully trust his readers; he habitually litters his prose with research notes. When a victim of a terrorist attack in Bahrain screams, "Call 119," the narrator helpfully explains: "The Bahraini equivalent of 911." By the time a Montego Bay hoodlum mentions Kingston, and the narrator adds, "the Jamaican capital," you feel as if you're stuck in a movie theater next to a whisperer you'd love to throttle. Thankfully, these intrusions soon vanish, letting Berenson's confidence with forensics, scenery and storytelling bloom. He's equally convincing as he guides us into the backseat of King Abdullah's speeding Maybach and places us in the hotel room (not to mention the mind) of a cross-dressing suicide bomber. From the first page of the prologue, Berenson's most innocuous settings (11 p.m. in an Irish bar, Manama, Bahrain) reliably fill us with dread. His characters are all adept with entertaining, rat-a-tat zingers, and whenever tension mounts, Berenson ends his paragraphs with dashes - But one of the most provocative passages in "The Secret Soldier" is one many readers won't notice. Set in tiny type on the copyright page is a long, unorthodox disclaimer, reaching far beyond the "any persons living or dead" boilerplate to detail how this novel turns Saudi Arabia's very real (and very much alive) King Abdullah into a central character, locked in an invented power struggle with invented brothers and invented sons. If the story doesn't send you racing to Wikipedia to catch up on the House of Saud and Mecca, this mind-bending footnote will. Plunking one of the world's wealthiest, most powerful men into a terrifying thriller? That's a twist even John Wells might not have seen coming. A mercenary spy must defuse a war on Arabian soil between the United States and the House of Saud. Todd Pruzan is the editor of GetCurrency.com and the author of "The Clumsiest People in Europe."
Library Journal Review
Edgar Award winner/No. 1 New York Times best-selling author Berenson (www.-alexberenson.com) presents his fifth John Wells title, after The Midnight House (2010), also available from Recorded Books and Penguin Audio. This time he takes our hero into the Byzantine world, among the hundreds of princes of the royal family, in Saudi Arabia. There, Wells, a Muslim American ex-CIA officer fluent in Arabic, serves as the king's main problem solver. Mix in family politics, tremendous wealth, radical Islamic factions, and the goal of igniting an American/Saudi Arabian war, and you have one gripping listen. The characters are fleshed out and not stereotypical; the good guys have some bad in them, and vice versa. Audie Award winner George Guidall's narration is nothing short of splendid. Highly recommended. [The review of the Putnam hc praised this "fast-paced thriller" for its "keenly memorable" characters and settings, LJ Xpress Reviews, 1/20/11.-Ed.]-Scott R. DiMarco, Mansfield Univ. of Pennsylvania Lib. (c) Copyright 2011. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.