Book Review: Termination Orders by Leo J. Maloney

The best thing about Goodreads is the recommendations that it produces based on books I’ve already read, and one of the best recommendations that’s popped up in the last three years of using the website is the debut novel by Leo J. Maloney.

As far as fast-paced thrillers go, Maloney’s Termination Orders is one from the very top shelf. Right from the outset, the plot moves along at an impressive rate of knots, dragging the main character Dan Morgan, t of a peaceful life in the Boston suburbs where he’s happily married with a daughter, back to Washington D.C., and the intrigue of the Central Intelligence Agency, where he used to work as a black ops specialist, with the foreboding codename Cobra.

Morgan learns that one of his oldest colleagues, Peter Conley (codename Cougar) has been killed in Afghanistan working on a very sensitive operation, and has written a letter, in a particular sort of code that only Morgan can decipher. It later turns out that Conley was working with a local asset who is now in possession of a data card full of classified information.

It didn’t come as much of a surprise to me when Morgan decided to re-join his old agency so that he could bring in Conley’s asset, and the information with him. From there, you rarely get to take a breath, as Morgan manages to obtain the data card, and is subsequently a hunted man, that hunt led by a former Russian agent, one whom Morgan helped defect years earlier. Of course, there are shadowy types back in Washington D.C. keeping an eye on the chase, and, as with any good thriller, not everyone is as they seem. There’s definitely a traitor in Langley, and what would one of these books be without an ambitious politician pulling the strings.

Termination Orders is one of those books where the main character – in this case, Morgan, who is really well-written – is basically on his own, unravelling what becomes a complex conspiracy, basically on his own. He really doesn’t know who he can trust until they turn up dead at the hands of the bad guys. So, from the Middle East back to America, he is hunted by all sorts of people, all connected to a government security contractor who are implicated by the images in the data card. Morgan’s family become targets for the people hunting him, so he must save them, too, and stop the end game: a political assassination on American soil.

So, yeah, there’s plenty going on in Termination Orders, and I raced through this one. You can’t easily put it down, not with well-written characters, so many twists and turns in the globe-trotting story, not to mention well-written and believable action scenes, and just enough political intrigue to make the whole plot fairly feasible. And, the length of the book is just right: the plot never bogs down or gets stale. Something is always happening.

I loved Maloney’s debut so much that I went to Kobo and bought every other book in the Dan Morgan series. The epilogue set up a very interesting scenario going forward, and I can’t wait to read more of Cobra’s adventures.