Book Review: Path of the Assassin by Brad Thor

Thor’s uber-hero Scot Harvath, a former Navy SEAL of some repute and currently a part of the United States Secret Service, is back with a vengeance in a globe-trotting thriller that pretty much picks up where Thor’s debut novel, The Lions of Lucerne, leaves off.

President Rutledge is alive and well after Harvath saved him from a cabal of kidnappers and conspirators (some of whom were Americans) and now, working directly for the president on a special assignment – to kill all those who were responsible for the kidnapping and the resulting death of a US special forces team, many of whom were Harvath’s friends – Harvath is in Macau, chasing down the last link in the conspiratorial chain before moving onto a new assignment as head of operations with the Secret Service.

Alas, things don’t go well, and Harvath’s new job is put on hold. Instead, he’s ringing up frequent flier miles with the best of them, chasing leads on a mysterious terrorist group called Hand of God, purportedly an Israeli terrorist group knocking off fairly prominent Muslim targets, leading the world towards the brink of a war between Israel and Islamic nations, which America and others would get drawn into – and there’s always the chance of a nuclear detonation in said conflict. All is not as it seems with that group, though, and the discovery of more about the mysterious terrorist group is a plot-line that runs in parallel to Harvath’s mission to kill the last man responsible

So, yeah, the stakes are pretty high, but there wasn’t the same urgency as in the first book, despite the fact that with every strike by Hand of God, the world is coming closer and closer to war. Harvath is, at times, hard to like due to his snide one-liners and a stubborn belief that he’s always right and that everyone else – particularly a hated colleague from the CIA named Rick Morrell – is wrong. He appears, at times, arrogant and certainly childish.

It’s eventually determined that the son of Abu Nidal, Hisham, is behind the attack and capture of President Rutledge, and the terrorist seems to be a sort of Bond villain, with silvery eyes that can’t be missed. During an attempted high-jacking of a United Airlines jet at Cairo airport, a PR expert, Meg Cassidy, becomes pretty much the only person in the world to actually get a good look at Nidal.

As a result, Cassidy is – incredibly improbably – drafted into the murky world of black ops, after a couple of weeks spent training with the CIA and Delta Force, because she’s the only one who can confirm the target for a CIA squad led by Harvath’s adversary Morrell. Then they’re off into the middle of a frantic and violent hunt for a vicious terrorist, and Cassidy, who is apparently a fast learner, manages to cover herself in glory.

Plenty happens in this book, and Thor’s knowledge and research of the various locales Harvath and Cassidy visit in their quest to help kill Nidal – Chicago, Rome and the Libyan desert, to name just three – is solid. No doubt about that, I just thought it could’ve been even better if he’d, say, cut out 50-100 pages, thus tightening things up. Plenty of the slightly-comical and definitely-moronic “banter” between Harvath and people he doesn’t like could’ve been left on the cutting room floor.

I didn't enjoy Harvath's second go-around as much as I enjoyed his first. Even so, Path of the Assassin was a good diversion for the few days it took me to finish, and I’ll definitely give the next book in the Harvath chronology a go, because I’m a sucker for these sorts of counter-terrorist thrillers.