- Flynn, Vince.
Protect and Defend.
New York: Pocket Books, 2007.
ISBN 978-1-4165-0503-7.
-
This is the eighth novel in the
Mitch Rapp
(warning—the article at this link contains minor spoilers)
series. I usually wait a month or two between reading installments
in this thriller saga, but since I'd devoured the previous
volume, Act of Treason, earlier this
month on an airline trip which went seriously awry, I decided
to bend the rules and read its successor on the second attempt
to make the same trip. This time both the journey and the novel were
entirely successful.
The story begins with Mitch Rapp cleaning up some unfinished
business from Act of Treason, then transitions
into an a thriller whose premises may play out in the headlines
in the near future. When Iran's covert nuclear weapons facility
is destroyed under mysterious circumstances, all of the players
in the game, both in Iran and around the world, try to figure out
what happened, who was responsible, and how they can turn events to
their own advantage. Fanatic factions within the Iranian power
structure see an opportunity to launch a proxy terror offensive
against Israel and the United States, while those aware of the
vulnerability of their country to retaliation for any attack
upon those nations try to damp down the flames. The new U.S.
president decides to use a back channel to approach the Iranian
pragmatists with a deal to put an end to the decades-long
standoff and reestablish formal relations between the nations,
and dispatches the CIA director to a covert meeting with her peer, the
chief of the Iranian Ministry of Intelligence and Security.
But word of the meeting makes its way to the radical
factions in Iran, and things go horribly wrong. It is then up
to Mitch Rapp and his small team, working against the clock,
to puzzle out what happened, who is responsible, and how to
respond.
If you haven't read the earlier Mitch Rapp novels, you'll miss
some of the context, particularly in the events of the first
few chapters, but this won't detract in any way from your enjoyment
of the story. Personally, I'd read (and I'm reading) the novels
in order, but they are sufficiently stand-alone (particularly after
the first few) that there's no problem getting into the series at
any point. Vince Flynn's novels are always about the action and
the characters, not preachy policy polemics. Nonetheless, one gets
a sense that the strategy presented here is how the author's
brain trust would like to see a confident and unapologetic West
address the Iranian conundrum.
May 2010 