From the author of the New York Times bestselling Monster Hunter series and an Air Force weapons expert, an edge-of-your-seat military-political thriller. A master thief and a hardhitting mercenary team up to defeat a Central Asian warlord with world-wide destruction on his mind.
On the far side of the world, deep in former Soviet Central Asia, lies a stronghold called the Crossroads. It is run with an iron fist by a brutal warlord calling himself Sala Jihan. He is far more than a petty dictator, for Jihan holds the fate of nations in his grasp. To save a world slipping into chaos, Jihan must either fall or be controlled.
One secret military organization called Exodus plans to see that this happens. For this mission, they need the best of the best. Unfortunately the man they need is rotting in an almost unassailable foreign prison.
Enter Lorenzo, thief extraordinaire. Lorenzo is now retired, happily married and living in paradise. His Achilles heel: an FBI-agent brother who has gone missing—disappeared into the stronghold of warlord Jihan. Exodus promises to give Lorenzo his chance to rescue his brother if and only if Lorenzo will perform one service for them: break Michael Valentine out of a captivity from which no one has ever emerged alive.
And if Lorenzo can accomplish that—well then, the Crossroads awaits the sword of Exodus.
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Product ReviewI thought Dead Six was first-rate. But I've had a lot of disappointments with sequels and series characters lately, so when I started Swords of Exodus, I more or less expected to be let down. After all, it's so easy to simply repeat oneself, to re-employ the heroes and villains from the previous volume unchanged, and to thrust them into exactly the same sort of gauntlet they endured before. Quite a lot of series writers do that and nothing else.
I have never been so happy to be proved wrong.
This book has every virtue a paramilitary adventure can offer: tension, action, mystery, moral crisis, well realized protagonists and antagonists, prodigious personal growth in returning characters Valentine, Lorenzo, Jill, Reaper, and Song Ling, a world-girdling plot that can't be unraveled by anyone but the authors, and every sort of emotion from helpless love to murderous rage. The writing is straightforward traditional storytelling, with nothing to distract the reader from the ever-heightening tension and ever-accelerating action as the story unfolds.
There will be a third volume. There must be. When you get to the end of Swords of Exodus, you'll know it, too. And I expect that, like me, you'll say that it can't possibly come soon enough.
Highly recommended!
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