THE LAST MINUTE

Just because the ex-wife and CIA colleague who betrayed Sam Capra lies in a coma and the son he’s never met has been kidnapped doesn’t mean there’s no more fight left in the man. Not by a long shot.

Forgoing such niceties as back story and exposition—hey, read Adrenaline (2011) if you want to get oriented—Abbott plunges into Sam’s story as he and his mysterious partner, Mila, are meeting with a representative from an illegal adoption agency in the hope of finding Sam’s infant son, Daniel. Naturally, the meeting goes awry, and Sam ends up with an offer he can’t refuse: agree to join a total stranger in tracking down and assassinating someone for the people who have his son if he ever wants to see Daniel face to face. Leonie, Sam's new accomplice, is an information broker so skilled at hiding people that the international outlaw organization Novem Soles figures she must be equally good at finding them. And she’s also under the gun, since Novem Soles has snatched her daughter, Taylor, as well. Their designated target is Jack Ming, a young hacker who’s learned more about Novem Soles than either he or they wanted. Jack has just flown from Europe to New York to visit his mother, Sandra, a State Department officer turned consultant, and put some distance between himself and his pursuers. Neither goal works out, and the second of many action sequences that seem choreographed with one eye on the movies leaves Sam holding Sandra’s hand as she expires and promising that he’ll do his best to protect her son. It’s all a lie, of course, but a dizzying series of plot twists will make it more true than Sam could have imagined.

Enough hired guns, double bluffs, CIA turncoats, narrow escapes, acts of political and personal treachery and scenes of armed and bare-knuckled combat for a miniseries. The perfect antidote for Downton Abbey.