cover image One Minute Out

One Minute Out

Mark Greaney. Berkley, $28 (512p) ISBN 978-0-593-09891-2

In bestseller Greaney’s remarkable ninth Gray Man novel (after 2019’s Mission Critical), Courtland Gentry (aka The Gray Man) takes on the Consortium, an international sex slave cartel, the existence of which he stumbles on while committing a hit on a Serbian strongman. A former CIA employee, Gentry fell out of favor to the point that the agency was trying to kill him, and after getting that misunderstanding straightened out, the agency is still kind of trying to kill him, though he works as an off-the-books assassin in a secret CIA program called Poison Apple. Never mind his official status. What’s important is that he’s probably the greatest assassin in the world, and those who oppose him usually end up dead. In this case, he decides to defy his bosses and hunt down the men who are part of the Consortium, running his own op with no help other than that from Talyssa Corbu, a junior analyst for Europol, whose sister the sex traffickers have captured. As always, Gentry is up to the task. Spy thriller fans will be enthralled. Author tour. Agent: Scott Miller, Trident Media Group. (Feb.)