One Minute Out

Starred review from December 16, 2019
In bestseller Greaney’s remarkable ninth Gray Man novel (after 2019’s Mission Critical), Courtland Gentry (aka The Gray Man) takes on the Consortium, an international sex slave cartel, the existence of which he stumbles on while committing a hit on a Serbian strongman. A former CIA employee, Gentry fell out of favor to the point that the agency was trying to kill him, and after getting that misunderstanding straightened out, the agency is still kind of trying to kill him, though he works as an off-the-books assassin in a secret CIA program called Poison Apple. Never mind his official status. What’s important is that he’s probably the greatest assassin in the world, and those who oppose him usually end up dead. In this case, he decides to defy his bosses and hunt down the men who are part of the Consortium, running his own op with no help other than that from Talyssa Corbu, a junior analyst for Europol, whose sister the sex traffickers have captured. As always, Gentry is up to the task. Spy thriller fans will be enthralled. Author tour. Agent: Scott Miller, Trident Media Group.

January 1, 2020
Ninth in the author's Gray Man series (Mission Critical, 2019, etc.) in which "the most elite assassin in the world" has his hands full. Ex-CIA Agent Courtland Gentry (the Gray Man) has Serbian war criminal Ratko Babic in his gun sight, but when he decides instead to kill the old beast face to face, he uncovers a massive sex-slavery ring. "I don't get off on this," the Gray Man lies to the reader as he stabs a sentry. "I only kill bad people." Of course he does. If there weren't an endless supply of them to slay, he'd have little reason to live. Now, countless young Eastern European women are being lured into sexual slavery and fed into an international pipeline, sold worldwide through "the Consortium." Bad guys refer to their captives as products, not people. They are "merchandise," but their plight haunts the Gray Man, so of course he is going to rescue as many women as he can. The road to their salvation will be paved with the dead as he enlists a team of fighters to strike the enemy, which includes a South African dude who is giddy for the chance to meet and kill the Gray Man. Meanwhile, Europol analyst Talyssa Corbu meets the hero while on a personal mission to rescue her sister. "You don't seem like a psychopath," she tells him. Indeed, though he could play one on TV. Corbu and her sister are tough and likable characters while the director of the Consortium leads a double life as family man and flesh merchant. Human trafficking is an enormous real-life problem, so it's satisfying to witness our larger-than-life protagonist put his combat skills to good use. There will be a sequel, of course. As a friend tells the wounded Gentry at the end, he'll be off killing bozos again before he knows it. Great storytelling about the pursuit of extrajudicial justice.

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