These days, a popular fictional character does not die when his (or her) creator does; so when Vince Flynn, writer of bestselling political thrillers passed away in 2013, Kyle Mills continued to write books with his hero, Mitch Rapp, a trigger-happy CIA counter-terrorist operative.

Flynn’s best-known novel American Assassin was turned into a movie. Mills, a bestselling writer himself, has done a fine job with Mitch Rapp, his Russian frenemy Grisha Azarov and CIA boss Irene Kennedy appearing in great form, along with some other regulars like Scott Coleman, Mitch’s partner Claudia Gould and her daughter Anna (his girlfriend died in an earlier book).

Kyle Mills, author of Red War.jpg - Red War.jpg

Red War, the seventeenth Mitch Rapp novel, has as the villain, a Vladimir Putin-like Russian autocrat Maxim Krupin. When he finds that he has brain cancer and will probably not live too long, he is quite willing to start World War III to keep up his image as a strongman in the eyes of the people.  Facing protests in the streets for the poor conditions in the country and unable to trust anyone in his inner circle, he springs out of retirement, the psychopathic General Andrei Sokolov, who will stop at nothing to bring back the glory of Mother Russia.

Krupin and Sokolov plan to destroy NATO, attack Baltic countries and engage the west in a war that would benefit nobody but himself—and as a man with nothing to lose, he is a tough adversary.

He is the kind of tyrant, who would mess with the power grid of Costa Rica to have his former hitman Grisha Azarov killed. Azarov has quit the madness periodically unleashed by power-hungry leaders, and is living peacefully with his girlfriend Cara, when the Russians attack. Rapp and Coleman happen to arrive in the nick of time to pull him out of his burning house, but Cara is badly wounded. Azarov is furious enough to consider mounting a hit on Krupin.

Meanwhile, Krupin hides out in the back of beyond, where medical personnel he has kidnapped conduct ghastly experiments on innocent civilians who have the same symptoms as Krupin, in the hope of finding a cure.  The CIA wonders why Krupin is behaving so erratically, and correctly concludes that he is terminally ill.

As the threat of nuclear war looms, it is up to Rapp and his new ally Azarov (who had tried to kill him in the past and had badly wounded Coleman) to find a way to stop the two Russian madmen.

Mills gets his politics right and the reader gets a worrisome look at the precarious state the world is in—for a change, the enemies are not middle-Eastern terrorists, but Russians with a death wish. The book is action-packed, pulse-pounding and scary for how realistic it is, even within the incredible two-man-army scenario and laughably adulatory portrayal of the CIA as a protector of the world against all possible threats anywhere on the planet.

 

Red War

By Kyle Mills for Vince Flynn

Publisher: Simon & Schuster

Pages: 400