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Summary
Summary
CIA agent John Wells returns in a cutting-edge novel of modern suspense from the #1 New York Times -bestselling writer.
Early one morning, a former CIA agent is shot to death in the street. That night, an army vet is gunned down in his doorway. The next day, John Wells gets a phone call. Come to Langley. Now.
The two victims were part of an eleven-member interrogation team that operated out of a secret base in Poland called the Midnight House. For two years, they put the screws to the toughest jihadis, men thought to have knowledge of imminent threats. The interrogators used whatever means necessary. When they were disbanded in the wake of public controversy, they were given medals for their heroism, Prozac for their nightmares. Now Wells must find out who is killing them. Islamic terrorists are the likeliest explanation, and Wells is uniquely qualified to go undercover after them. But the trail of blood he discovers will lead him and his boss, Ellis Shafer, to a place they wouldn't have imagined-and leave Wells facing the hardest of questions about the men of the Midnight House.
Berenson's work has been called "superior entertainment" ( The Washington Post ), "heart-stopping adventure" ( USA Today ), and "a superb yarn reflecting the myriad dangers confronting our country today" ( The Providence Journal ). He is one of the world's best new thriller writers-and he is just getting started.
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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
George Guidall's no-nonsense tough guy growl adds a sense of hard-boiled reality to this fourth adventure featuring coolly efficient CIA agent John Wells. Working with his considerably more emotional associate, Ellis Shafer, Wells investigates the assassinations of interrogation team members working on a group of jihadists at a secret location known as the Midnight House. Berenson switches from Wells's and Shafer's difficult and perilous search, which takes the former to and from Cairo, to a sequence of flashbacks involving the team members going about their grim job at the House. The result is a clever mix of detective story and spy thriller, with Guidall handling the chronological and genre shifts as smoothly and efficiently as he does the changes in accents. A Putnam hardcover (Reviews, Dec. 7). (Feb.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Kirkus Review
Superspy and serial country-saver John Wells (The Silent Man, 2009, etc.) seeks to uncover the truth about a string of murdered operatives from a top-secret unit. Last seen stopping an Islamist plot to detonate a nuclear device in Washington, D.C., CIA agent Wells is called back to duty from a rest period in New Hampshire by his grouchy but loveable Agency handler Ellis Shafer. It seems CIA head Vincent Duto, with whom Wells has repeatedly butted heads, wants them to look into a string of suspicious deaths. The victims are all veterans of Task Force 673, which operated out of a covert detention facility in Poland. The two start poking around, Wells in Egypt disguised as a Kuwaiti activist, Shafer on the domestic front. Eventually, they begin to suspect that not only might a string of former captives want the members of 673 dead, but so too might some in the U.S. intelligence establishment who have reason to fear the consequences if the truth about what 673 was up to comes to light. The stakes are much lower than Berenson's usual hereno plot to detonate a major U.S. citybut the novel as a whole and Wells' character in particular benefit from the additional breathing room. Any fictional CIA agent would do whatever it takes to prevent a known terrorist attack, but here we see how far Wells is willing to go to discover the truth for its own sake. After all, a man can only save the country from destruction so many times before he begins to look like a character in a comic book. A superbly crafted spy thriller that doubles as a gripping mystery; the reader has no idea who the killer is until Wells figures it out. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
Former members of a top-secret, joint CIA-army team of interrogators at a secret prison in Poland, Task Force 673, are dying, and Agent John Wells is recalled from self-imposed exile to find out why. The director of Central Intelligence (DCI) tells Wells that the intel derived by 673 was stovepiped directly to the Pentagon; the man who knows what 673 learned is now director of National Intelligence, the nominal boss of the DCI. In Cairo, posing as a Kuwaiti, Wells satisfies himself that Islamist terrorists aren't behind the deaths, and he returns to the U.S. to look for the killers. Berenson tells a fast-paced and riveting tale that ranges from derring-do in Pakistan and Cairo, to plodding gumshoe detection in L.A. and New Orleans, to assassination in San Francisco, and to bureaucratic trench warfare in Washington, D.C. His characters are either deftly sketched or fully realized. His writing is succinct, with dashes of cynical humor. But the book's linchpin is decisions made by the U.S. after 9/11 decisions that seem to be sparking a flurry of outstanding espionage novels, with Berenson's work in the forefront.--Gaughan, Thomas Copyright 2010 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
The celebrated C.I.A. agent John Wells returns to action in "The Midnight House," Berenson's fourth spy thriller to combine ripped-from-the-headlines political developments with popular entertainment. One by one, members of a disbanded torture squad are being killed on American soil, and Wells is called to Langley to solve their murders without digging too deeply into their covert interrogations of jihadists at a black-site Polish prison. "The Midnight House" moves from the mountains of New Hampshire and Washington's corridors to the swarming streets of Cairo and Islamabad as Wells works to solve the killings while tracking high-profile detainees and uncovering the misdeeds of the victims' secretive Squad 673. A former New York Times reporter, Berenson combines his thorough knowledge of the Middle East with an acquired sense of corporate intrigue in this bullet-paced, psychologically engaging tale of torture and espionage. By cutting between the murder mystery and the operations of the torture squad, Berenson explores the realities of war and terror as assiduously as he does the personal dramas of politics and civilian life. A master juggler, he tosses in a few corrupt national intelligence agencies and the conspiracy-laden assassination of Benazir Bhutto without slowing his pace or stalling his shocking conclusion.
Library Journal Review
Berenson's (The Faithful Spy) latest ingeniously plotted and fast-paced story again offers superspy John Wells, who is called upon by shifty CIA superiors to investigate the systematic murders of members of a now-disbanded supersecret interrogation team known as the Midnight House. Our well-equipped hero deduces that both the dead interrogators and agency executives harbored an extraordinarily dangerous political secret as well as participated in various forms of financial corruption. The story features emotionally affecting and high-action scenes in vividly portrayed settings; memorable characters contribute to the reader's comprehension of how the CIA's overseas "rendition" program may have been of enormous benefit to national security but also grossly immoral and personally destructive to its participants, terror suspects and interrogators alike. Verdict Arguably Berenson's best thriller yet, this outstanding novel stands on the top rung of commercial spy fiction. [See Prepub Alert, LJ 10/1/09.]-Jonathan Pearce, California State Univ. at Stanislaus, Stockton (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.