Black Flagged Redux

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.