- Carr, Jack.
True Believer.
New York: Atria Books, 2019.
ISBN 978-1-5011-8084-2.
-
Jack Carr, a former U.S. Navy SEAL, burst into the world of
thriller authors with 2018's stunning success,
The Terminal List (September 2018).
In it, he introduced James Reece, a SEAL whose team was
destroyed by a conspiracy reaching into the highest levels
of the U.S. government and, afflicted with a brain tumour
by a drug tested on him and his team without their knowledge
or consent, which he expected to kill him, set out for
revenge upon those responsible. As that novel concluded,
Reece, a hunted man, took to the sea in a sailboat, fully
expecting to die before he reached whatever destination he
might choose.
This sequel begins right where the last book ended. James
Reece is aboard the forty-eight foot sailboat
Bitter Harvest braving the rough November
seas of the North Atlantic and musing that as a
Lieutenant Commander in the U.S. Navy he knew very little
about sailing a boat in the open ocean. With supplies
adequate to go almost anywhere he desires, and not
necessarily expecting to live until his next landfall
anyway, he decides on an ambitious voyage to see an old
friend far from the reach of the U.S. government.
While Reece is at sea, a series of brazen and bloody terrorist
attacks in Europe against civilian and military targets send
analysts on both sides of the Atlantic digging through their
resources to find common threads which might point back to
whoever is responsible, as their populace becomes increasingly
afraid of congregating in public.
Reece eventually arrives at a hunting concession in Mozambique,
in southeast Africa, and signs on as an apprentice professional
hunter, helping out in tracking and chasing off poachers who
plague the land during the off-season. This suits him just fine:
he's about as far off the grid as one can get in this over-connected
world, among escapees from Rhodesia who understand what it's like
to lose their country, surrounded by magnificent scenery and
wildlife, and actively engaged in putting his skills to work
defending them from human predators. He concludes he could get
used to this life, for however long as he has to live.
This idyll comes to an end when he is tracked down by another
former SEAL, now in the employ of the CIA, who tells Reece that
a man he trained in Iraq is suspected of being involved in the
terrorist attacks and that if Reece will join in an effort to
track him down and get him to flip on his terrorist masters,
the charges pending against Reece will be dropped and he can
stop running and forever looking over his shoulder. After
what the U.S. government has done to him, his SEAL team, and
his family, Reece's inclination is to tell them to pound sand.
Then, as always, the eagle flashes its talons and Reece is told
that if he fails to co-operate the Imperium will go after
all of those who helped him avenge the wrongs it inflicted upon
him and escape its grasp. With that bit of Soviet-style recruiting
out of the way, Reece is off to a CIA black site in the
REDACTED region of REDACTED to train with REDACTED for his
upcoming mission. (In this book, like the last, passages
which are said to have been required to have been struck
during review of the manuscript by the Department of Defense
Office of Prepublication and Security Review are blacked out
in the text. This imparted a kind of frisson
and authenticity the first time out, but now it's getting
somewhat tedious—just change the details, Jack, and
get on with it!)
As Reece prepares for his mission, events lead him to believe
he is not just confronting an external terrorist threat but,
once again, forces within the U.S. government willing to
kill indiscriminately to get their way. Finally, the time
comes to approach his former trainee and get to the bottom
of what is going on. From this point on, the story is what
you'd expect of a thriller, with tradecraft, intrigue,
betrayal, and discovery of a dire threat with extreme
measures taken under an imminent deadline to avoid catastrophe.
The pacing of the story is…odd. The entire first third
of the book is largely occupied by Reece sailing his boat and
working at the game reserve. Now, single-handedly sailing
a sailboat almost halfway around the globe is challenging and
an adventure, to be sure, and a look inside the world of an
African hunting reserve is intriguing, but these are not what thriller
readers pay for, nor do they particularly develop the character
of James Reece, employ his unique skills, or reveal things about
him we don't already know. We're half way through the book
before Reece achieves his first goal of making contact with
his former trainee, and it's only there that the real mission
gets underway. And as the story ends, although a number of
villains have been dispatched in satisfying ways, two of those
involved in the terrorist plot (but not its masterminds) remain
at large, for Reece to hunt down, presumably in the next book,
in a year or so. Why not finish it here, then do something
completely different next time?
I hope international agents don't take their tax advice from
this novel. The CIA agent who “recruits” Reece
tells him “It's a contracted position. You won't pay
taxes on most of it as long as you're working overseas.”
Wrong! U.S. citizens (which Reece, more fool him, remains)
owe U.S. taxes on all of their worldwide income, regardless
of the source. There is an exclusion for salary income from
employment overseas, but this would not apply for payments by
the CIA to an independent contractor. Later in the book, Reece
receives a large cash award from a foreign government for dispatching
a terrorist, which he donates to support the family of a
comrade killed in the operation. He would owe around 50% of the
award as federal and California state income taxes (since his
last U.S. domicile was the once-golden state) off the top, and
unless he was extraordinarily careful (which there is no evidence
he was), he'd get whacked again with gift tax as punishment for
his charity. Watch out, Reece, if you think having the FBI,
CIA, and Naval Criminal Investigative Service on your tail is
bad, be glad you haven't yet crossed the IRS or the California
Franchise Tax Board!
The Kindle edition does not have the attention to detail you'd
expect from a Big Five New York publisher (Simon and Schuster)
in a Kindle book selling for US$13. In five places in the text,
HTML character entity codes like “&8201;” (the
code for the thin space used between adjacent single and double
quote marks) appear in the text. What this says to me is that
nobody at this professional publishing house did a page-by-page
proof of the Kindle edition before putting it on sale. I don't
know of a single independently-published science fiction author
selling works for a fraction of this price who would fail to do
this.
This is a perfectly competent thriller, but to this reader
it does not come up to the high standard set by the debut
novel. You should not read this book without reading
The Terminal List first; if you don't, you'll
miss most of the story of what made James Reece who he is
here.
August 2019 