Twelve Days
By Alex Berenson
Release Date: February 20, 2015
Ebook Available from WV Reads!
3 stars - Another exciting politcal thriller featuring the capable John Wells. Picking up the action from the previous entry takes a little while to resume. By about halfway through, Wells is set to find the real terrorists in time to stop a war between the US and the Middle East. I'd recommend this series to fans of David Baldacci or Lee Child looking for something just a bit different.
While the John Wells series can frequently be read as standalones (such as The Night Ranger), this is like Part 2 of 'The Counterfeit Agent' in many ways. That previous book sort of ended on a cliffhanger. Wells is a excellent spy in the same category as Jason Bourne or The Gray Man. He is typically cold and unemotional but every now and then there are cracks in his armor. We start this book with him choosing his commitment to his career over starting a family with his younger girlfriend. He is all in and the stakes are high.
I took a few years off before recently returning to this series. But it was either better than I remembered or gets better with age. Berenson uses a nice balance of detail between the globe-trotting action and geopolitics. Sometimes, Wells' skills are a bit overblown but not in a way that goes beyond a little eye roll. The side characters, while not always likable, always have a vivid background and personality. Shady senator Duto, crabby bossman Shafer, and even the new villian, the subtly evil Salome are all memorable. A few parts of the plot were almost too similar to previous entries. They just felt a bit too familiar and maybe didn't add much tension. I found myself thinking like "oh, and John will of course get himself out of here again." But at points in this story the pace was a little slower and I think I actually enjoyed it. Wells had more dialouge with other characters and some of the tension was nicely drawn out. Everyone seemed to have something on the line by the last several chapters. And I am looking forward to the next few books.
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