Dead Man Walking
Vince Flynn wrote popular political thrillers (American Assassin being the best known, turned into a movie) with
Mitch Rapp, a CIA counter-terrorist operative, as his protagonist ; after his
death in 2013, Kyle Mills continued to write them, under the current publishing
trend of keeping characters alive ever their creators have passed way to continue
a profitable franchise.
Mills, a bestselling writer himself, has done a fine job with Mitch
Rapp, his Russian frenemy Grisha Azarov and CIA boss Irene Kennedy appearing in
great form, along with some other regulars like Scott Coleman, Mitch’s partner
Claudia Gould and her daughter Anna (his girlfriend died in an earlier book).
Red War, the seventeenth Mitch
Rapp novel, has as the villain, a Vladimir Putin-like Russian autocrat Maxim
Krupin. When he finds that he has brain cancer and will probably not live too
long, he is quite willing to start World War III to keep up his image as a
strongman in the eyes of the people.
Facing protests in the streets for the poor conditions in the country
and unable to trust anyone in his inner circle, he springs out of retirement,
the psychopathic General Andrei Sokolov, who will stop at nothing to bring back
the glory of Mother Russia.
Krupin
and Sokolov plan to destroy NATO, attack Baltic countries and engage the west
in a war that would benefit nobody but himself—and as a man with nothing lose,
he is a tough adversary.
He
is the kind of tyrant, who would mess with the power grid of Costa Rica to have
his former hitman Grisha Azarov killed. Azarov has quit the madness
periodically unleashed by power-hungry leaders, and is living peacefully with
his girlfriend Cara, when the Russians attack. Rapp and Coleman happen to
arrive in the nick of time to pull him out of his burning house, but Cara is
badly wounded. Azarov is furious enough to consider mounting a hit on Krupin.
Meanwhile,
Krupin hides out in the back of beyond, where medical personnel he has
kidnapped conduct ghastly experiments on innocent civilians who have the same
symptoms as Krupin, in the hope of finding a cure. The CIA wonders why Krupin is behaving so
erratically, and correctly conclude that he is terminally ill.
As
the threat of nuclear war looms, it is up to Rapp and his new ally Azarov (who
had tried to kill him in the past and had badly wounded Coleman) to find a way
to stop the two Russian madmen.
Mills
gets his politics right and the reader gets a worrisome look at the precarious
state the world is in—for a change, the enemies are not middle-Eastern
terrorists, but Russians with a death wish. The book is action-packed,
pulse-pounding and scary for how realistic it is, even within the incredible
two-man-army scenario. Even if Mitch
Rapp’s perfectly-timed appearances, hair-trigger escapes and way of getting out
of every violent encounter unscathed seem exaggerated, and the CIA’s protector-of-the-world
stance ridiculous, Red War is a
hugely enjoyable read.
By Kyle Mills for Vince Flynn
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Pages: 400
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