The Secret Soldier

✍ Scribed by Alex Berenson

• Publisher: Jove
• Year: 2011;2014
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 216 KB
• Category: Fiction
• ISBN: 0399157085

✦ Synopsis

In Saudi Arabia, a series of terrorist attacks has put the Kingdom on edge. King Abdullah is losing his hold, and his own secret police cannot be trusted. With nowhere to turn, the king asks for ex-CIA agent John Wells's help.

Reluctantly, and with the secret blessing of his former CIA boss, Wells begins to unravel the conspiracy, and realizes that there is more than one country at stake-because the plotters want more than the fall of a monarch. They want to start the final battle between America and Islam-with only themselves as the victors...

From Publishers Weekly

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.)
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From Booklist

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. --Keir Graff