SEAL Team Six: Hunt the Fox

Mann and Pezzullo's fraught fifth SEAL Team Six thriller (after 2014's Hunt the Jackal) finds Thomas Crocker, the leader of Black Cell, a special unit attached to the CIA, shaken by an unusually high number of deaths. Crocker's recent work has cost the lives of several colleagues, as well as those of civilians who became collateral damage. That bad luck continues when a young CIA operative working with him in Istanbul is pushed under a bus. The agent's death is somehow connected with a new assignment for Crocker's team, whose members fortunately have an abnormal amount of neuropeptide Y, an amino acid that serves as a natural tranquilizer, giving them a "major physical advantage in pressure situations." That mission starts in Syria, where they must prevent the terrorist known as the Fox from launching a sarin attack. Readers can expect plenty of action from this installment, but little sophistication or depth. Agent: Heather Mitchell, Gelfman Schneider Literary. (May)