Since the events chronicled in White Hot Silence (2019) and Firefly (2018), former MI6 agent Paul Samson has been lying low, doing private security work. He's shadowing young environmental activist Zoe Freemantle--a thoroughly routine assignment until Samson is nearly killed by a not particularly polished assassin. Another clumsy hit attempt follows, and Samson, using his clandestine skills to track the assassins and their bosses, finds himself dealing with the fallout from the mess that led to his exit from MI6. His friend, the legendary CIA agent Robert Harland, has been killed, and Dennis Hisami, the husband of Samson's former lover Anastasia, has been poisoned by a neurotoxin while being interrogated at a congressional hearing. Both of these events suggest that Samson is the next target, but he's in the dark about why, prompting him to return to Estonia, where Harland was living, in search of answers. The trail leads to Mila Daus, once a feared Stasi interrogator in East Germany, now a billionaire who pedals data to the Russians and who has ensnared British and American government officials in honey traps. Porter makes brilliant use of material ripped from today's headlines--Russian cultivation of Western assets, nefarious data mining--to construct a riveting thriller, bolstered by a moving love story and a stunning finale in which a second congressional hearing shows that sometimes the good guys can outwit their cutthroat adversaries.

In Porter's complex conclusion to his Paul Samson trilogy (after 2019's White Hot Silence), former MI6 agent Samson's private security job watching data whiz Zoe Freemantle as she tries to penetrate the workings of the sinister social media behemoth GreenState gets unexpectedly violent, and the long strings of his past entanglements with the Greek beauty Anastasia Hisami and her husband, Kurdish guerilla fighter turned billionaire philanthropist Denis Hisami, tighten in a fast-paced series of physical attacks. Samson quickly grasps he's still the target of a revenge plot directed by shadowy Russian operative and criminal Anatoly Stepurin. As Samson tries to figure out whether he's predator or prey, he gets warnings from his old colleagues and heavy-handed interventions from CIA agents with puzzling motives. The many action sequences substitute in effect for character development, and a surfeit of expository passages detail what happened in the first two books in order to bring newcomers up to speed. This elaborate wrap-up is for series fans already invested in Samson and company. Agent: Emma Parry, Janklow & Nesbit Assoc. (June)