Executive Force
What's It About?
How does an international political thriller open?With a sniper putting the cross-hairs of a 6.5 Creedmore Bolt-Action Rifle on a politician’s forehead in a sleepy New England town and squeezing the trigger? With an operative cutting a fence, breaking into LAX, making his way across the runway, posing as a TSA officer, getting into a plane and successfully putting a bag in the overhead compartment? With an autopsy on a U.S. Senator in Kansas City revealing ricin poisoning? With a spy inserting a malware-laden thumb drive into the computer of a Whale Class ballistic missile submarine docked at Yuktae-dong, North Korea?
Yes, any of these would make great openings – and all of these can be found in Executive Force (Diversion Books), the latest thriller in The Executive Series by Gary Grossman.
But the New England assassination is on page 20, the breach of LAX security on page 45, the verdict of ricin poisoning page 99 and the sabotage of a submarine by computer virus page 125.
What’s on the very first pages of this thriller – and indicative of what makes this thriller different from others in the genre – is a meeting years before any obviously dramatic stuff. It’s a meeting back in 1999 in a prestigious private school in Switzerland. Here, the 16-year-old son of a North Korean “diplomat” starts a friendship with a 17-year-old American boy.
They bond over video games and an interest in what their history teacher has been lecturing on today: assassinations.
Fast-forward to today: The United States of America is on the verge of becoming disunited in Montana, Idaho, Oregon and Washington – a grassroots movement pushes toward secession. From Boise, ID, to Spartanburg, SC, local and national political figures are being systematically assassinated. With the clock ticking toward a monumental constitutional crisis, the U.S. president assigns Secret Service Agent Scott Roarke to investigate the assassinations.
Roarke’s hunt takes him to Naples, Italy where he meets with a local Mafia boss who passes along a list of three men whom the boss wants dead…then to Dian, France where a stakeout of a farmhouse ends in an explosion…
Meanwhile…
In Moscow a CIA spy and his Russian counterpart cautiously exchange information…in Tel Aviv a Mossad agent ponders how to identify a “ghost”…and in Quantico, VA, the FBI’s leading expert in FERET (FacE REcognition Technology) studies sketches of a killer.
Going back in time…
Ten months earlier, in Sao Paulo, Brazil, a French assassin and a North Korean colonel make a deal. 14 years earlier, a Korean killed in a motorcycle accident in Australia is “reborn” with the help of the CIA and inserted into China…
Meanwhile…
Scott Roarke’s finance, Katie Kessler, is in trouble.
An assistant to the Chief Justice of the United States, she has gone to Missoula, MT, the center of the secession movement. There, under a false name, she intends to learn what legal arguments the secessionists may soon be making to the Supreme Court. But she stumbles onto something larger: links between the secessionist movement and the assassinations. And she risks having her cover uncovered by, of all people…
…a handsome young man named Clay Lindstrom who, age 17 in 1999, forged a friendship with a certain 16-year-old North Korean who now happens to be that country’s Supreme Leader.
In Anju, in one of his 14 opulent residences, the Supreme Leader is gorging on pizza and playing the latest edition of NBA Showdown. Furious at reports coming from the United States, he screams at his staff and threatens two with death. He breathes a sigh of relief when reports come from somewhere named Boise.
It all comes together as Roarke in a BMW pursues “the ghost” in a Mercedes in a high-speed chase through Washington. A U.S. submarine works with an Indian Navy E.L.F. (Extremely Low Frequency) radio base to give the Supreme Leader’s submarine fleet an unpleasant surprise.
Ingeniously plotted, authentically detailed, chillingly mesmerizing, imaginatively dramatizing real and present dangers, Executive Force is an international political thriller that hits with force.
Executive Force is now available to purchase.
Learn more about Gary on his Author Profile page.
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