An FBI countersurveillance expert continues his mission against a generation of Russian agents secretly working in the U.S.

While software engineer George McDonald sends valuable intel on missile tests to Russia before disappearing, Karl Berg attempts to pull off a deadly collaboration with Israel that he hopes will get him back into the good graces of Russian crime lord Yuri Pichugin, a Putin puppet. Pichugin operative Felix Orlov is meanwhile tracking the movements of FBI agent Devin Gray, whose team is on the trail of a nest of deeply embedded Russian agents in Baltimore and elsewhere. Gray has inherited his mission from his mother, Helen, a deceased CIA agent, and yes, it’s personal. These are the major chess pieces in Konkoly’s elaborate thriller, unfolded at a brisk pace and built on regular twists and questions of allegiance. Chief among them: Why is Berg collaborating with Devin…or is he? Though readers would certainly benefit from having read Deep Sleep (2022), the previous Devin Gray adventure, the author effectively weaves in the backstory as he thrusts the action forward from the get-go. His knowledge of technology and weapons adds authenticity. Drone strikes and the tracking of them figure prominently. The operation begins in Baltimore but takes Devin and his gritty sidekick and old pal, fighter pilot Marnie Young, to Russia and Ukraine. Konkoly’s basic premise—that a network of Russian agents has lived here for decades, thus attracting no suspicion—is frighteningly believable, giving his story extra juice.

A deft cat-and-mouse novel that keeps the action moving and the reader guessing.

With a CIA mother and an FBI son, espionage is all in the family—but could mom have betrayed her country?

While dreaming of her imminent training in the Negev Desert, new Israeli army recruit Maya Klein almost loses her life in a bombing raid from which Hal Cohen, a friend of her family's, rescues her. Halfway across the world, former CIA officer Helen Gray is on the trail of mysterious Donald Wilson. Her son, Devin, an FBI agent, is meanwhile guarding software engineer Brian Chase, who’s been led by his dire financial straits to be a decoy in an FBI “honey trap.” Insomniac agent Harvey Rudd worries that the team of “borderline retired” operatives he’s thrown together will be unable to complete their hostage rescue mission. Author Konkoly rolls out all these charged narrative threads, disconnected pieces of an oversized jigsaw puzzle, within the first 30 pages of his new cat-and-mouse thriller, then keeps readers engaged and guessing with brisk shifts of location and clarifying nuggets of information. Helen’s death rocks Devin’s world, but his sadness turns to skepticism when it’s ruled a suicide. Worse, she’s suspected of felonious and possibly treasonous activities. Even as Devin acknowledges his mother’s impulsiveness and attraction to danger, this is hard for him to believe. A post-mortem audio recording sets him on the road to the truth. He teams up with fighter pilot Marnie Young, an old pal, to enliven the story and unravel the tangled plot, which circles back to the Mideast.

A lively, roller-coaster thriller that moves like lightning.

An ex–CIA operative and his family are targeted by a seemingly unstoppable team of killers.

A brief teaser prologue finds action hero Ryan Decker facing down an armed mercenary. Just three days earlier, the scene at the Decker home is idyllic. Ryan banters with his dad, Steven, while his mother, Audrey, is out and about. As Ryan’s partner, Harlow, discusses domestic issues, Ryan’s teenage daughter, Riley, heads off to school with her bodyguard, Brooklyn, an ex–Israeli soldier studying for her PI license. Outside the family circle, turmoil is brewing, and the nefarious group APEX has either been wiped out or is lying low. In a mere 30 pages, Konkoly takes his story to half a dozen locations and introduces more than a dozen additional characters without descriptions or identifiable personalities. There’s a plane attack, a failed Mission: Impossible–type caper, and much talk of dangerous missions, “housecleaning,” and more destruction planned by the APEX Institute, whose latest deadly plot is named SKYSTORM. Readers new to the series who are enjoying Konkoly’s punchy prose and rat-a-tat dialogue should persevere; veterans will recall roots of the backstories in Ryan’s three previous adventures. When the sprawling first act ends, the tale settles into a sleek action thriller, long on narrow escapes and authoritative descriptions of weaponry. Pursuit and attack begin at Riley’s school, which APEX has infiltrated. Ryan’s prickly pal Pam, prominent in previous yarns, joins the good guys just in time to help with the heavy shooting.

Explosive action, a breakneck pace, and zippy dialogue. Next!

Military mayhem on a California marijuana farm.

Supersoldier Ryan Decker and an impromptu collection of comrades in arms take on a corporate criminal enterprise in this conventional thriller. Brett Hale has gone missing on "Murder Mountain," the epicenter of the marijuana cultivation industry in Humboldt County, California, and Decker's investigation of the disappearance, which began as a simple favor for Sen. Margaret Steele, a friend of Hale's mother’s from law school, uncovers a vast corporate takeover of the pot farming business. Bankrolled by the Athena Corporation, this quasi-military enterprise, code-named EMERALD CITY, anticipates a harvest worth in the neighborhood of $2 billion and is commensurately dedicated to preserving its secrecy. Decker's attempt to locate Hale provokes a reaction from EMERALD CITY and, in essence, starts a war. Heavy on weaponry and security technology, the narrative moves toward the inevitable final shootout without much verve or spirit. Decker himself is a somewhat rounded military character, and Harlow, his partner/girlfriend, is marginally believable, but most of the other characters are predictable: a sheriff reluctant to upset the status quo, a ruthless security manager, an evil political-influence peddler, and so on. Interestingly, several female characters enter the fray, but they are stand-ins, effective only when they fight "like men." The battle descriptions are detailed and sometimes not confusing, but the real stars of the book are weapons, bristling with spiky acronyms, and electronic security technologies.

An old story with updated weapons.

Action hero Daniel Petrovich tackles a worldwide biological-weapons threat in the second installment of Konkoly’s (Black Flagged, 2011, etc.) thriller series.

In a rural compound in Argentina, retired U.S. general Terrence Sanderson plans to reactivate his rogue Black Flag training program. He believes that the only effective way to tackle the world’s problems is by sending operatives on under-the-radar black-ops missions. However, Sanderson is wanted by the FBI for past misdeeds, and his best operatives, married couple Daniel and Jessica Petrovich, are having issues of their own. Jessica, who’s haunted by her previous undercover work, even tries to talk her husband into leaving the program. Amid this tension, a new assignment bubbles up: CIA agent Karl Berg, who has gone “off the books” before, has gotten wind that a disgruntled Russian scientist has unleashed a virulent virus into the water of a remote Russian town to demonstrate the weapon’s worth to Muslim extremists. With Daniel on the ground in Russia and illegally deployed CIA drones in the air, Sanderson and Berg join forces to observe the contagion and track down the scientist before the Russian government covers up the danger. Meanwhile, Jessica, taking a break in Buenos Aires, gets a visit from Serbians seeking revenge. The pace certainly doesn’t flag in this second entry in U.S. Naval Academy graduate Konkoly’s series. The book has an often confusing array of government-agency players, which makes Konkoly’s front-of-book character list a particularly welcome and necessary reference. The author’s description of the rabies-like Russian contagion is particularly intriguing and will no doubt please fans of The Walking Dead graphic-novel and TV series. The series continues to struggle with character development, however, within its imaginative plots; for example, Daniel, who rose up as a potential hero of the series in the first book, retreats somewhat into the background here, serving as merely another tool in the author’s entertaining tale of covert activities on the world stage.

An exuberantly plotted, if uneven, entry in a promising thriller series.

Daniel Petrovich, a former operative in the Department of Defense’s top-secret Black Flag program, is recalled to duty in this launch of a new thriller series.

Brandishing an ax and soon to butcher the wheelchair-bound brother of a Serbian crime boss, Marko Resja—aka Daniel Petrovich, a deep-cover American operative working under the direction of Gen. Terrence Sanderson—muses that this assassination will soon set him free. Six years later, Petrovich, happily married to Jessica and working at a semiconductor company in Maine, receives a call for “Marko”—and a new mission from Sanderson. Petrovich resists until the name Zorana Zekulic is mentioned, then he executes the directive to kill a nearby Muslim businessman. Petrovich’s hit is one of eight coordinated assassinations that together take down an FBI operation tracking al-Qaida funding. The FBI and CIA soon connect the killings to Sanderson, uncovering the now-retired general’s rogue and apparently reactivated Black Flag program. CIA assistant director Karl Berg deploys his own covert team to grab Petrovich, since, as Marko, his beheading of a CIA agent is among the crimes. Obeying yet always distrusting Sanderson, Petrovich flees Maine to meet up with his former boss, hoping all the while he’ll be able to contact and start a new life with Jessica. U.S. Naval Academy graduate Konkoly (The Jakarta Pandemic, 2010) has crafted a well-paced thriller that sets his new series in motion, providing entertaining plot twists, nifty evasion techniques and a healthy dose of cynicism about government agencies. The array of secondary characters can get a bit dizzying at times, making the cheat-sheet list the author provides particularly helpful. Prime mover Sanderson’s motivations remain somewhat murky, but perhaps more will be revealed in future installments. Hero Petrovich also has plenty of potential, with more to explore regarding his existential qualities (reminiscent of Robert Ludlum’s Jason Bourne), his rather unexpressed romantic yearnings and his shockingly unapologetic execution of extremely violent acts.

A promising start to a complex new black-ops thriller series.