cover image The Midnight House

The Midnight House

Alex Berenson, read by George Guidall, Penguin Audio, unabridged, nine CDs, 11 hours, $39.95 ISBN 978-0-14-314539-4

George Guidall’s no-nonsense tough guy growl adds a sense of hard-boiled reality to this fourth adventure featuring coolly efficient CIA agent John Wells. Working with his considerably more emotional associate, Ellis Shafer, Wells investigates the assassinations of interrogation team members working on a group of jihadists at a secret location known as the Midnight House. Berenson switches from Wells’s and Shafer’s difficult and perilous search, which takes the former to and from Cairo, to a sequence of flashbacks involving the team members going about their grim job at the House. The result is a clever mix of detective story and spy thriller, with Guidall handling the chronological and genre shifts as smoothly and efficiently as he does the changes in accents. A Putnam hardcover (Reviews, Dec. 7). (Feb.)