- Flynn, Vince.
American Assassin.
New York: Atria Books, 2010.
ISBN 978-1-4165-9518-2.
-
This is the eleventh novel in the
Mitch Rapp
(warning—the article at this link contains minor spoilers)
series. While the first ten books chronicled events in
sequence, the present volume returns to Rapp's origins as
an independent assassin for, but not of (officially, at
least) the CIA. Here, we revisit the tragic events which
predisposed him to take up his singular career, his recruitment
by rising anti-terrorist “active measures” advocate
Irene Kennedy, and his first encounters with covert operations
mastermind Thomas Stansfield.
A central part of the story is Rapp's training at the hands
of the eccentric, misanthropic, paranoid, crusty, profane,
and deadly in the extreme Stan Hurley, to whom Rapp has to
prove, in the most direct of ways, that he isn't a soft
college boy recruited to do the hardest of jobs. While Hurley
is an incidental character in the novels covering subsequent
events, he is centre stage here, and Mitch Rapp fans will delight
in getting to know him in depth, even if they might not be inclined
to spend much time with the actual man if they encountered him
in real life.
Following his training, Rapp deploys on his first mission and
immediately demonstrates his inclination to be a loose cannon,
taking advantage of opportunities as they present themselves and
throwing carefully scripted and practiced plans out the window
at the spur of the moment. This brings him into open conflict
with Hurley, but elicits a growing admiration from Stansfield, who
begins to perceive that he may have finally found a
“natural”.
An ambitious mission led by Hurley to deny terrorists their
financial lifeblood and bring their leaders out into the open
goes horribly wrong in Beirut when Hurley and another operative
are kidnapped in broad daylight and subjected to torture
in one of the most harrowing scenes in all the literature of
the thriller. Hurley, although getting on in years for a
field operative, proves “tougher than nails” (you'll
understand after you read the book) and a master at getting
inside the heads of his abductors and messing with them, but
ultimately it's up to Rapp, acting largely alone, adopting a
persona utterly unlike his own, and risking everything on the
hope of an opportunity, to come to the rescue.
I wasn't sure how well a Rapp novel set in the context
of historical events (Beirut in the early 1990s) would work,
but in this case Flynn pulls it off magnificently. If you
want to read the Rapp novels in story line sequence, this is
the place to start.
December 2010 