The Old Enemy

In Porter's complex conclusion to his Paul Samson trilogy (after 2019's White Hot Silence), former MI6 agent Samson's private security job watching data whiz Zoe Freemantle as she tries to penetrate the workings of the sinister social media behemoth GreenState gets unexpectedly violent, and the long strings of his past entanglements with the Greek beauty Anastasia Hisami and her husband, Kurdish guerilla fighter turned billionaire philanthropist Denis Hisami, tighten in a fast-paced series of physical attacks. Samson quickly grasps he's still the target of a revenge plot directed by shadowy Russian operative and criminal Anatoly Stepurin. As Samson tries to figure out whether he's predator or prey, he gets warnings from his old colleagues and heavy-handed interventions from CIA agents with puzzling motives. The many action sequences substitute in effect for character development, and a surfeit of expository passages detail what happened in the first two books in order to bring newcomers up to speed. This elaborate wrap-up is for series fans already invested in Samson and company. Agent: Emma Parry, Janklow & Nesbit Assoc. (June)