A HIRED KILL
by Steven Konkoly
A righteous FBI agent is both hunter and prey as he fights international cabals.
Garrett Mann’s second adventure picks up just where his debut appearance, A Clean Kill (2024), left off, with Mann, the head of FBI task force ARTEMIS, and his partner, Catalina Serrano, in an underground facility in New Mexico full of ill-gotten cash. Roughly interrogating captive Elena of the deadly Juárez Cartel, they extract a promise of her assistance. The subsequent action-packed plot is twisty rather than complex. As he pursues various members of villainous cabals, whom can Mann trust? Konkoly introduces an overwhelming number of faceless, largely interchangeable characters and an alphabet soup of acronyms, some familiar (FBI, CIA, SWAT, ICE, ICU, ATF), some less familiar or invented (SCIF, AXIOM, LABYRINTH, BOLO, DOMINION). Readers who let these details slide and follow the driven Mann on his mission will be rewarded with punchy prose, rhythmic scenes of hand-to-hand combat, high-tech wizardry, sophisticated weaponry, and so many surprise reveals—you know, those moments when we learn that a supposed ally is actually a sworn enemy—that the story often feels like raw material for a graphic novel. While Mann and Serrano pursue La Triada, a Mexican crime syndicate, a cabal of bureaucrats bolstered by some UK mercenaries implement a risky plan to wipe out Mann’s ARTEMIS. Will Serrano’s thirst for revenge against La Triada undermine her rationality?
A feverish international thriller that perpetually reshuffles its focus and allegiances.