IN THE CROSSHAIRS

Marine-turned–CIA sniper Kyle Swanson is back to take on two targets at once, the Taliban and the Mexican drug cartels.

Swanson’s friend and sometime partner Elizabeth “Coastie” Castillo retired from duty and married a Mexican former Marine at the end of the last installment. Now she’s newly widowed in a mysterious machine-gun attack, and her husband’s funeral is disrupted by a grenade explosion. The evidence points to Russian agent Nikola Markovitch, a Russian spy who worked for the CIA under the name Nicky Marks but has lately become involved in an alliance between the Taliban and the cartels—both of whom have long-standing grudges against Swanson. As he chases Marks from Europe to Afghanistan, Swanson is partnered with Luke Gibson, a suspiciously gung-ho young agent whose background may not be as clean as it looks. Meanwhile Swanson looks after Coastie's rehabilitation but doesn’t realize she’s coming a little unhinged, avenging her husband’s death with a series of unauthorized sniper attacks on drug traffickers. As usual in this series, the unresolved relationship of Swanson and Coastie provides the story’s most interesting human element.

Coughlin and Davis (Long Shot, 2016, etc.) have the action/revenge formula down to a science, making this another enjoyable if predictable page-turner.