Lethal Agent

April 1, 2019

Created by late thriller great Flynn and here deployed by No. 1 New York Times best-selling Mills, Mitch Rapp gets busy when ISIS forces a leading French microbiologist to manufacture anthrax, hiring a Mexican cartel to smuggle the drug across the U.S. border and showing videos to get the world anxious. But it's all a feint to disguise their plans to use a deadly virus discovered in Yemen. With a 500,000-copy first printing.

Copyright 2019 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

July 29, 2019
Bestseller Mills’s rousing fifth Mitch Rapp novel (after 2018’s Red War) pits Mitch, the creation of Vince Flynn (1966–2013), against Mullah Sayid Halabi, an ISIS terrorist grievously wounded in an earlier battle with Mitch. Halabi, a man with a grudge, kidnaps Gabriel Bertrand, a brilliant French microbiologist, to assist him in spreading the deadly disease known as Yemeni Acute Respiratory Syndrome around the world. The only way Mitch can stop the plan is to sacrifice his personal life and go undercover into the ranks of Mexican cartel boss Carlos Esparza, whose minions are set to infect populations with the disease. Meanwhile, Senator Christine Barnett, a traitor, lusts to win the U.S. presidency, an ineffectual president just wants to sit out the remainder of his term, and an American electorate reacts only to partisanship and hatred. Despite these familiar plot elements, Mills makes them fresh and handles the writing as skillfully as Flynn as ever did. The pages will fly by. 8-city author tour. Agent: Simon Lipskar, Writers House.

August 15, 2019
This latest offering from the late Flynn by way of Mills (Red War, 2018, etc.) shows that as long as bad guys run amok or crazy women run for president, America will need Mitch Rapp. The terrorist Mullah Sayid Halabi barely survives an attack by Mitch Rapp, who is ex-CIA and a private contractor and the bane of all who hate America. Then Halabi concocts an attack he believes no one would ever anticipate: to weaponize anthrax, slip it through the Mexican border, and target politicians who support Middle East intervention. He will follow up with a new disease called YARS that will kill Westerners by the tens of millions and spark "a pandemic that would fundamentally change human existence for generations." Why he doesn't skip the anthrax and go straight to YARS is unclear. One person Halabi doesn't want to hurt is the godless Sen. Christine Barnett, the probable successor to President Josh Alexander. Americans don't care about God, health care, or the environment, she muses privately. They just want "to hurt the people they hate." As president, she will "get the hell out of the Middle East" (leaving poor Rapp without much killing to do). Meanwhile, Halabi "relished the thought" of Barnett exploiting his attacks for political gain. She's too useful to attack because he knows she's a traitor to America. Their biggest obstacle is Rapp, the killing machine. "There were white hats and there were black hats," Rapp muses. "When you killed all the people in the black hats, the job was done." It's too bad the contrasts are so stark, especially with liberal Barnett being an irredeemable nut job. Author Mills is a terrific storyteller, of that there is no doubt. But it's so damn easy to read "white hats" as "MAGA hats," and implying that half the country is unpatriotic gets old after a while. Mills does a great job carrying on Vince Flynn's legacy; fans won't be disappointed.

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Starred review from September 15, 2019
Not fully finishing the job haunts Mitch Rapp in the latest novel in Mills' continuation of the Vince Flynn series. When an ISIS leader whom Rapp attempts to assassinate escapes, Rapp is determined to close the deal. But so is the terrorist, who wants Rapp dead at all costs. If he can kill a few thousand Americans in the process, all the better, hence a bold plan that involves ISIS teaming up with a Mexican drug cartel to smuggle bioweapons across the border. Add a tumultuous election that threatens to weaken the country's intelligence community, and it's clear that Rapp will have to conduct his mission without his usual resources. Mills continues to keep Flynn's characters vibrant, entertaining, and relevant, the latter thanks to involving Rapp in timely global issues. The writing is stellar, and the action is nonstop, as always, continuing the legacy that makes the Rapp series the best of the best when it comes to the world of special ops. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: For military-action fans, Flynn was the gold standard, and Mills has done nothing to change that.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2019, American Library Association.)