Midnight Black by Mark Greaney
I’ve read a lot of the Mark Greaney “Gray Man” books, and I’ve interviewed Greaney about them a few times too. Great writer, great series. So it’s no surprise at all that Midnight Black — the latest in the Gray Man series — is one heckuva terrific page-turning, heart-pounding, action-filled thriller. Or that the story Greaney tells here is so real it reads like it could have been ripped from the headlines of world events today.
The Gray Man’s Newest Deadly Mission
The Gray Man is Courtland (Court) Gentry, a former top CIA operative now working on his own as a shadowy figure and paid assassin who follows his own moral code in the world of international intrigue.
But in this book, Gentry’s desperate mission is not about saving the world; he just wants to save one woman: Zoya Zakharova, his partner and lover, who is being held in a brutal Russian prison.
The slam-bang action begins right from the opening page of Midnight Black when Gentry finds himself in a seedy bar in Bucharest, Romania with five armed men who are about to ambush and kill him. Five against one, he doesn’t have a chance, right? Well, with most men that might be the case, but not the Gray Man. He quickly kills all five without any of them ever even getting a chance to get off a shot
Then, after he leaves the bar, he encounters another gang of would-be killers like the ones inside and quickly wipes them out too.
Yep, the body count goes up very quickly and often in this book.
All of this is a prelude to Gentry’s efforts to somehow sneak undetected into Russia to rescue Zoya — who was taken prisoner by the Chinese at the end of the last Gray Man book, The Chaos Agent, and then given over to the Russians for some undisclosed reason. Everyone tells Gentry she is probably dead by now. But he refuses to believe it, and, of course, we soon find out Zoya is alive. Still, she is imprisoned in a remote gulag of a penal colony in a freezing cold wasteland in the vast north plains of Russia. Torture, abuse and most likely death are all these prisoners like Zoya face from their sadistic Russian captors.
The Incredible Depth of Greaney’s Characters
One of the great things about Greaney’s writing is he provides us with many other wonderful characters besides The Gray Man himself.
Characters like Zoya, as Greaney describes the day-to-day unbelievably harsh conditions she is subjected to in the Russian gulag while Gentry is still trying to figure out a way to find out where she is and rescue her.
Another terrific character from the earlier Gray Man books is Zach Hightower, a former intelligence operative with Gentry who has a long history with him — and plays a key role in this story, too.
In addition to Zoya and Hightower, there are many other fascinating characters that Greaney brilliantly brings to life throughout Midnight Black — both good guys (and women) who help him in his quest to find Zoya and bad guys standing in the way who usually wind up dead at his hands.
And then, of course, there are the action scenes — which come fast and furious throughout the book. Writing this kind of real-life action is one of Greaney’s strong points in all the Gray Man books. He’s well-known for all the research he does on military matters as part of his writing. He has trained in firearms and sniper tactics, flown in the back seat of an F-18, been on a destroyer, and observed activities at many military bases. So even though The Gray Man is fictional, all of the action — including the weapons and his martial arts abilities and the rest of his combat skills — come across as completely authentic.
How Mark Greaney Created the Iconic Gray Man
Greaney has talked in the past about how he came up with the idea for the phenomenally successful Gray Man character by watching a hard-looking American one night at a bar in El Salvador. He began to speculate for no particular reason that the man was a CIA agent hiding out off the grid as a private assassin. He never spoke to the man or had any idea who he really was. But, at that moment, Greaney has recalled, The Gray Man — Court Gentry — was born.
Since then, there have been 14 hugely popular and highly praised Gray Man thrillers — along with a Gray Man movie on Netflix featuring Ryan Gosling as Court Gentry.
It’s definitely been a winning formula for Greaney writing the Gray Man books since that chance encounter and moment of inspiration in an El Salvador bar that happened more than 15 years ago.
And an even bigger win for us readers who get the opportunity to read great thrillers like Midnight Black!
Related Posts:
Fans of Netflix’s “The Gray Man” Will Love this Next Assassin Thriller from Mark Greaney
Mark Greaney’s Gray Man Faces Deadly Artificial Intelligence in “The Chaos Agent”
About Mark Greaney:
#1 NYT bestselling author Mark Greaney’s debut international thriller, The Gray Man, was published in 2009 and became a national bestseller and a highly sought-after Hollywood property. Netflix released the film version of The Gray Man, starring Ryan Gosling, Chris Evans, and Ana de Armas, in 2022.
Twelve subsequent Gray Man novels have been released to date, including his latest, Midnight Black.
Mark is also the #1 New York Times bestselling author or co-author of seven Tom Clancy novels.
Red Metal, a military thriller written by Mark Greaney and Lt Col Hunter R. Rawlings, USMC, became a New York Times bestseller in 2009, and Armored, the first book in the Joshua Duffy thriller series, was released in 2022. A sequel to Armored, Sentinel, will be released June 25th, 2024.
