This is the first of now more than 20 international spy novels by a Memphis writer, some of them with Tom Clancy, and it is now a film on Netflix with Ryan Gosling and Billy Bob Thornton, released in Feb. 2022.
The young Gray Man hero of the title is a former CIA agent who then branches out on his own as an assassin-for-hire to do whatever dirty work anyone will pay him to do, whether it is to off politicians or to silence those about to expose corrupt acts of corporate bigwigs and government agents.
By a third of the way in, I found myself unrealistically hoping someone would succeed in killing him off early so I would not have another 250 pages to read. After 200 pages, I had had enough and finished him off myself by stopping reading about him (in spite of being given the book as a gift). I’ll admit to some curiosity at that point about how much sillier the story could get so I scanned through the remaining pages only to find more of the same senseless cruelty, and violence. The Gray Man’s feats in escaping capture by equally unscrupulous government and corporate security forces are unrealistic to the point of being silly. Dozens of killer squads from around the world with endless supplies of various lethal guns and grenades cross international borders unimpeded. The tight time lines of his many narrow escapes are features of numerous thriller novels, designed to build tension in readers to keep them engaged, but here they are particularly weak and transparent.
I realize that many readers enjoy this James Bond-ish flavour of fiction just as many enjoy unrealistic murder mysteries on TV or streaming services, but the only way I could get as far as I did with this one was to consider it as a spoof of the whole spy thriller genre. I generally avoid novels that turn violent villains into heroes, unless it is realistic historical fiction. There is enough violence and cruelty to deal with in the real world aftermath of history and present day world events to never have to expand it into the fantasy world of fiction.
⭐️
Thanks,
Andra via Cratejoy
The Passionate Reader 