FADE IN

Fade is a badass operator whom even a coma can’t stop.

Salam al-Fayed is an ex-SEAL, ex-CIA, and ex-Homeland Security agent, an American of Arab descent who takes out an entire Black Ops team that’s charged with either “recruiting him or burying him.” You can call him Fade, as everyone else does. He’s a brave warrior and antihero who tries to help a girl in distress and gets stabbed and shot in the melee. He winds up in a coma from which he may never awaken, but of course he does. Then he may be destined to spend "the rest of his life rotting in a prison hospital bed,” but of course he doesn’t. After being pumped full of meds and blood from ethically questionable sources, he recovers and undergoes extensive rehab. But since the internet thinks he’s dead, his colleague and former friend Matt Egan tells him he’s now Frederick Abdel Darwish (so you can still call him Fade). All this is a creative setup for what is otherwise a standard thriller. Legendary warrior that he is, greater powers intend to use him for their own questionable purposes. Enter the obscenely wealthy Jon Lowe, who’s decided that the world’s so messed up he has no choice but to take it over. To make it a better place, of course. There’s also a Chinese scientist who engineered Covid-19 to target people over 70, whom he believes are useless. He’s going to try again, by creating a weapon of mass destruction from the building blocks of life. Reports of a secret lab bring a team including Fade to Madagascar, where they find a drought-stricken village that criminals are robbing of food aid. In the wilderness, Egan sets a challenge to a five-man team including Fade in which only four of them can possibly succeed. The unexpected result adds another dimension to Fade’s personality—he’s not a cardboard-cutout killer. One may sense that Mills began with a title and then built a character and story around it, but that’s fine. In time, a beautiful woman is assigned to share his apartment and watch over him, subject to terms and conditions. For example, sex no more than seven times a week. With that, the reader might expect at least one vivid sex scene. Alas, no. One person notes that Fade, pushing 40, was half nuts even before the coma. Apparently, that doesn’t change.

Plenty of action, plenty of fun.