- Mills, Kyle.
The Survivor.
New York: Pocket Books, 2015.
ISBN 978-1-4767-8346-8.
-
Over the last fifteen years, CIA counter-terrorism operative
Mitch Rapp
(warning—the article at this link contains minor spoilers)
has survived myriad adventures and attempts to take him out
by terrorists, hostile governments, subversive forces within
his own agency, and ambitious and unscrupulous Washington
politicians looking to nail his scalp to their luxuriously
appointed office walls, chronicled in the thirteen thrillers
by his creator,
Vince Flynn.
Now, Rapp must confront one of the most formidable challenges
any fictional character can face—outliving
the author who invented him. With the death of Vince Flynn
in 2013 from cancer, the future of the Mitch Rapp series was
uncertain. Subsequently, Flynn's publisher announced that
veteran thriller writer
Kyle
Mills, with fourteen novels already published, would be
continuing the Mitch Rapp franchise. This is the first novel
in the series by Mills. Although the cover has Flynn's name in
much larger type than Mills', the latter is the sole author.
In this installment of the Rapp saga, Mills opted to dive right
in just days after the events in the conclusion of the previous
novel,
The Last Man (February 2013).
The CIA is still reeling from its genius black operations
mastermind, Joseph Rickman, having gone rogue, faked his own
kidnapping, and threatened to reveal decades of the CIA's
secrets, including deep cover agents in place around the world
and operations in progress, potentially crippling the CIA and
opening up enough cans of worms to sustain the congressional
committee surrender-poultry for a decade. With the immediate Rickman
problem dealt with in the previous novel, the CIA is
dismayed to learn that the ever-clever Rickman is himself a
survivor, and continues to wreak his havoc on the agency from
beyond the grave, using an almost impenetrable maze of
digital and human cut-outs devised by his wily mind.
Not only is the CIA at risk of embarrassment and exposure of its
most valuable covert assets, an ambitious spymaster in Pakistan
sees the Rickman intelligence trove as not only a way to destroy
the CIA's influence in his country and around the world, but the
means to co-opt its network for his own ends, providing his
path to slither to the top of the seething snake-mountain which
is Pakistani politics, and, with control over his country's
nuclear arsenal and the CIA's covert resources, become a player
on the regional, if not world scale.
Following Rickman's twisty cyber trail as additional disclosure
bombshells drop on the CIA, Rapp and his ailing but still
prickly mentor Stan Hurley must make an uneasy but
unavoidable alliance with Louis Gould, the murderer of Rapp's
wife and unborn child, who almost killed him in the previous novel,
in order to penetrate the armed Swiss compound (which has me green
with envy and scribbling notes) of Leo Obrecht, rogue private
banker implicated in the Rickman operation and its Pakistani
connections.
The action takes Rapp and his team to a remote location in
Russia, and finally to a diplomatic banquet in Islamabad where
Rapp reminds an American politician which fork to use, and how.
Mitch Rapp has survived. I haven't read any of Kyle Mills'
other work, so I don't know whether it's a matter of his
already aligning with Vince Flynn's style or, as a professional
author, adopting it along with Flynn's worldview, but had I not
known this was the work of a different author, I'd never have
guessed. I enjoyed this story and look forward to further
Mitch Rapp adventures by Kyle Mills.
July 2017 