Countdown to Midnight

Bestseller Brown’s worthy sequel to 2021’s Arctic Storm Rising finds former U.S. Air Force intelligence agent Nick Flynn, now with the Quartet Directorate, a private intelligence outfit, in Austria for a clandestine rendezvous on a ski slope with Arif Khavari, “a high-ranking official in Iran’s state-owned shipping company.” While Khavari is talking about modifications being made to an oil tanker in an Iranian shipyard, a Russian sniper shoots him dead. Flynn flees the scene and eventually links up with fellow agent Laura Van Horn, who appeared in Arctic Storm Rising. The pair travel to Florida, where they try to figure out what the Iranians and their Russian helpers are planning with the modified tanker. Meanwhile, Pavel Voronin, the head of a syndicate that supplies military services to private companies and operations overseen by Russia’s autocratic president, isn’t pleased to learn that the unknown operative who met with Khavari eluded his team of assassins. The full, world-shaking scope of Voronin’s secret project involving the tanker comes out only late in the novel amid twists, revelations, and a terrific final fight scene. Military action fans will be enthralled. Agent: Robert Gottlieb, Trident Media Group. (May)