Sphere of influence

Format:

Book

Title:

Sphere of influence

Author:

Mills, Kyle, 1966- author.

ISBN:

9780399149344

9780451209443

Publication:

New York : G.P. Putnam's Sons, [2002]

Physical Description:

439 pages ; 24 cm.

Number in series:

Summary:

Mark Beamon has always been an unconventional FBI agent. Years of putting the truth ahead of political expediency have resulted in a dead-end job in the Phoenix office. But a new terrorist threat brings him back from the wilderness. A videotape proves that a terrorist cell in the United States has access to modern missile technology. Suspecting there is a connection between the Mob and the fanatics, Beamon is sent undercover with a fellow FBI agent. When the other agent is brutally murdered, Beamon's attempts to trace the man who fingered them leads him into an international criminal conspiracy that may have roots in the American government. As events plunge him into a river of deceit, he is forced to address the most important question of his life: What makes a crime a crime?--Publisher description (http://catdir.loc.gov/catdir/enhancements/fy0716/2002024929-d.html).

Subject(s):

Government investigators -- Fiction.

Undercover operations -- Fiction.

Conspiracies -- Fiction.

Terrorism -- Fiction.

Genre:

Suspense fiction.

Thrillers (Fiction)

Fiction.

Electronic Access:

http://www.kylemills.com

Holds:

Available:*

Library	Call Number	Status
Searching... McMinnville Public Library	Mills, K.	Searching... Unknown
Searching... Dallas Public Library	FICTION - MILLS	Searching... Unknown

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Summary

Hailed by Tom Clancy as a novelist who is fast becoming "the new master of gripping and intelligent page-turners," Kyle Mills is at the forefront of America's hot new thriller writers. His New York Timesbestsellers Storming Heavenand Burn Factorshowed Mills to be a storyteller of breathless pacing, stylish prose, and chilling effectiveness. In Sphere of Influence, he takes FBI agent Mark Beamon into unnervingly hazardous territory, with shattering results. Mark Beamon has always been an unconventional FBI agent. Years of putting the truth ahead of political expediency have resulted in a dead-end job in the Phoenix office. But a new terrorist threat brings him back from the wilderness. A videotape proves that a terrorist cell in the United States has access to modern missile technology. Suspecting there is a connection between the Mob and the fanatics, Beamon is sent undercover with a fellow FBI agent. When the other agent is brutally murdered, Beamon's attempts to trace the man who fingered them leads him into an international criminal conspiracy that may have roots in the American government. As events plunge him into a river of deceit, he is forced to address the most important question of his life: What makes a crime a crime?

Author Notes

Kyle Mills was born in 1966. He moved around a lot as a child because his father was an FBI agent. He graduated college with a degree in finance and worked in a bank before becoming a writer. His first book, Rising Phoenix, took eight months to write and was published in 1997. His other works include Storming Heaven, Sphere of Influence, Fade, The Second Horseman, Lords of Corruption, Robert Ludlum's The Ares Decision, and The Immortalists. His title Robert Ludlum's the Utopia Experiment made The New York Times Best Seller List for 2013. His books, The Survivor, co-written with Vince Flynn, made The New York Times bestseller list in 2015 and Order to Kill, also co-written with Vince Flynn, mady the New York Times besetseller list in 2016.

(Bowker Author Biography)

Reviews (4)

Publisher's Weekly Review

New York Times bestseller Mills (Burn Factor) returns with his fifth novel, featuring brilliant FBI tough guy Mark Beamon, who is investigating a terrorist threat linked to a global conspiracy. Killing time on a dead-end assignment while the Bureau plans his downfall, Beamon is thrown together with his former colleague Laura Vilechi when a videotape is delivered to the American media, indicating that Al Qaeda has smuggled a rocket launcher into the U.S. Their threat to use it against civilian targets has thrown the country into a panic, with people afraid to leave their homes. Meanwhile, Chet Michaels, one of Beamon's former trainees, now deep undercover in pursuit of a psychotic Mafioso, is nervously watching drug deals being made with shadowy Afghans. Looming behind all of this is a CIA deal with the devil (in the form of Christian Volkov, an international criminal mastermind), in which the U.S. government attempts to use organized crime figures as a proxy underworld army in the so-called war on terror. This thriller features real people and groups drawn from daily news headlines, playing on the anxieties of the American public-from the heroin trade to terrorism (and the connections between the two). But Mills avoids cynical exploitation, offering up human characters and a story that, despite some implausible subplots and heavy-handed editorializing, remains engrossing and affecting. Author tour. (Oct.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

Kirkus Review

A CIA plot involving Afghan terrorists unsurprisingly blows up, requiring FBI solutions and assistance from an ethical and pleasant narco-trafficker. Mills brings back chain-smoking, out-of-shape FBI agent and ace investigator Mark Beamon (Free Fall, 2000, etc.), now Special Agent in Charge of the Phoenix office where he's floundering as an administrator, flubbing his evaluation, alienating his staff, mishandling his girlfriend, and in a funk. Unfortunately for the nation, but helpful for Beamon's mental state, a gang of Afghans has slipped through the border with a rocket launcher, four rockets, and tons of heroin. The terrorists quickly give the US a case of market-tanking jitters with their threat to pop off the rockets. Laura Vilechi, Beamon's colleague and best friend in the Bureau's upper reaches, reaches out for Beamon's help in finding that launcher and those Afghans, starting with a little pressure on the CIA, who, as is their custom, have been holding back helpful info about the world of evil. Beamon, who, despite his smoking and bad tailoring, is a Yalie, calls his chum, the president's chief of staff, and sets up a an interagency powwow. Indeed, the perfidious rats at Langley have been holding out on the Bureau, and they're not about to tell all now, certainly not about the intra-agency freelancing that brought about the latest round of terror. Beamon and Vilechi sort their way through the few available clues, getting shadowy assistance from Christian Volkov, an interglobal drug merchant first thought to be at the root of the troubles.The Volkov alliance will prove worrisome for Beamon, but the discomforts are smoothed by Volkov's sensational house chef and the comforts of the trillionaire's many homes on many continents. And Volkov's a nice guy. Not like the terrorists of the Central Intelligence Agency. It will take many, many pages, several executions, countless cell-phone calls but no sex for Beamon to save the world. A technothriller without the hardware. Author tour

Booklist Review

FBI agent Mark Beamon was once considered the best investigator in the bureau. He also set new standards for ignoring protocol and embarrassing his superiors. That's why his career is stalled in middle-management hell as the head of the Bureau's Phoenix office. Then he gets a call from his former lover, Laura Vilechi, who is the lead FBI investigator in a new al-Qaeda crisis. The terrorists have cobbled together a rocket launcher inside the U.S. and also have four operational rockets. She needs Mark's investigative skills to find the launcher before hundreds, maybe thousands, of Americans are killed in a September 11 redux. The lead she has Mark follow trails back through a botched drug deal and eventually places him undercover in the Russian crime organization run by Christian Volkov. It's there he learns that the CIA, employing its standard tortured logic, laid the groundwork for the latest al-Qaeda plot by disrupting the world heroin market. Beamon and Volkov form an uneasy alliance in which he will help Beamon discover the launcher location if Beamon will help him retain control of the heroin market. This is a brilliant modern crime thriller with a byzantine--yet believable--plot, a plucky hero, and villains who manipulate world events from their lofty positions in government. Mills does the large-scale thriller better than anyone else working the genre today. As a matter of fact, he may do it better than anyone who's ever sent a character out to save the world. --Wes Lukowsky

Library Journal Review

Reeled in from a dead-end job, outspoken FBI agent Mark Beamon is sent undercover to investigate a terrorist cell with access to modern missile technologyand promptly sees a fellow agent get murdered. From the author of The Burn Factor. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.