Book Review: Protect and Defend

Have any of you ever read a Vince Flynn novel? If you haven't, you might want to give it a go.

Flynn writes what I like to think of as "romance-novels-for-men"... books with spies, guns, military hardware, and a main character that so many of us wish we could be. In Flynn's seven novels to date, he has had the coolest main character that you can imagine: Mitch Rapp, a dedicated and almighty lethal counter-terrorist operative of the Central Intelligence agency.

Mitch Rapp is a bad dude. (he's even badder than me!). He is a killer, but not just a brute. Mitch Rapp can speak Arabic, Farsi, and some other languages. He is deadly with a machinegu, a sniper rifle, a pistol, knife, or just about anything else, including a soup spoon.

In Flynn's newest novel, Protect and Defend, Iran's secret nuclear facility is destroyed by an undercover Mossad agent and as the flurry of events afterward increase, the Director of the CIa and the Chief of Iranian intelligence decide to meet for some back-channel discussions, in Mosul, Iraq.

Immediately after their meeting, CIA Director (and mentor/friend of Mitch Rapp) Irene Kennedy is kidnapped by an elusive Hezbollah operative. Mitch Rapp swings into action, killing damned-near EVERYbody that gets in his way.

This book is a slam-bang action story in which there is one bombing, one ambush/gun battle in the streets of Mosul, several summary executions, hand to hand combat to the death, a daring rescue, a domestic assassination, interrogations, torture, the beginning of a new romance, and a military stand-off that leads the United States and Iran to the brink of open warfare.

If you like this sort of stuff, read this.

If you are unfamiliar with the genre, read it anyway.

This isn't intellectual stuff, but, by God, it sure is fun!