The latest in the Gray Man series continues to demonstrate why Greaney belongs in the upper echelon of special-ops thriller authors. Court Gentry, the Gray Man, who works covertly for the CIA, is on board a Company transport plane when a security team arrives with a hooded man and forces Court to sit on the opposite side of the plane. Who is this mysterious man? When the plane lands in the UK, it is ambushed, all of the passengers (except Court, who escapes) are shot, and the man with the hood is abducted. After surviving the attack, Court is tasked with tracking the team of attackers. To complicate matters further, a CIA safe house in the States is also attacked, with the apparent objective of eliminating a new asset, Zoya Zakharova, someone whom Court cares about deeply. Let the chaos begin, as the Gray Man sets about exacting his no-holds-barred brand of justice. The tension in this adrenaline-fueled thriller, the eighth in the series, never lets up for more than 500 pages. Remarkably, each Gray Man novel is better than the ones that came before.--Jeff Ayers Copyright 2019 Booklist

At the start of bestseller Greaney's exciting eighth Gray Man novel (after 2018's Agent in Place), CIA contract agent Court Gentry (aka the Gray Man), who has received a last-minute summons to Langley, is picked up by a CIA Gulfstream in Zurich. The plane stops in Luxembourg City, where a team of CIA agents boards with a hooded prisoner. The next stop is an English air base, where the Americans are to hand over the prisoner to MI6. On landing, gunmen mow down the two transaction parties on the tarmac, grab the prisoner, and drive him away in a van. Court pursues the van in a powered glider he commandeers. Meanwhile in the U.S., Court's love interest, former Russian intelligence officer Zoya Zakharova, is being questioned at a CIA safe house. When the safe house comes under attack, Zoya is the only one in the house to escape. The two assaults are related, as revealed in between the many intense scenes with even higher high body counts that follow. Greaney knows what military action fans want and delivers in spades. Author tour. Agent: Scott Miller, Trident Media Group. (Feb.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

Bad guys galore live and die in this latest entry in the Gray Man series (Agent in Place, 2018, etc.).Courtland Gentrycode-named Violator is a freelance assassin on contract with the CIA. His handler, series regular Suzanne Brewer, is often frustrated with his propensity to act alone. "Being a team player had been fun while it lasted," Violator muses at one point, "but it was time to go off mission." So Brewer is tempted to take drastic action, but he's hardly her only problem. Zoya Zakharova is a former Russian spy code-named Anthem who's flipped to the West and is "an equally insubordinate singleton." The threat they all have to worry about is definitely a team player. She is Won Jang-Mi, aka Janice Won, a West-hating North Korean scientist specializing in pneumonic plague and hemorrhagic fever. Russians are behind a plot for Won to unleash a biological attack on the West, and she has a 10-week deadline to get it done. Meanwhile, Zakharova's father, Feodor Zakharov, now lives in the West under the alias David Mars, and each believes the other is dead. Father and daughter working passionately on opposite sidesimagine the coming family reunion! This novel is vintage Greaney, with a tight plot, a ticking clock, and a sympathetic antihero. Violator is "not psyched at all about killing multiple carloads of men," but he loses no sleep over it, either. The action is almost nonstop, with nice twists right to the end. There are also small doses of humor, as when tough guy Zack Hightower whines about his CIA code name, Romantic. The characters are by and large plucked from central casting, but they suit the story's needs well enough.This is good, Clancy-esque entertainment. May the evildoers of the world have nightmares that Violator becomes a real person. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.