Sierra Six

Bestseller Greaney’s excellent 11th Gray Man novel (after 2021’s Relentless) delivers a double helping of honorable mercenary Courtland Gentry (aka the Gray Man), smoothly alternating between his first assignment with the “door kickers” of CIA paramilitary team Golf Sierra to interdict a terrorist group intent on detonating dirty radioactive bombs against American forces and his present-day quest for revenge on the planners of that enemy action. In the past, Gentry, though already a whispered figure in the halls at Langley, struggles to integrate his “singleton” lone-wolf strategies (and sometimes naive moral code) with unfamiliar military tactics, but team leader Zack Hightower is impressed with his almost-preternatural killing and tradecraft abilities, and Gentry is deployed with the squad to Pakistan. Twelve years after the devastating end of that mission, Gentry stumbles into his presumed-dead adversary, Murad Khan, on the cusp of staging an even deadlier evolution of his earlier plan. Greaney seamlessly adjusts focus between the timelines, jumping from one exhilarating roller-coaster ride to the other. Spy and military thriller fans will be well pleased. Agent: Scott Miller, Trident Media Group. (Feb.)