NOW THEY WILL KNOW I AM HERE

A debut thriller features a CIA officer who must stop a terrorist attack.

In Paris, a van carrying two “briefcase-size parcels” to the U.S. Embassy is ambushed, sparking an international crisis. The driver of the van is beheaded in the assault, suggesting merciless terrorists are involved. Enter American Tom Rivers, a CIA officer who formerly worked in Army intelligence. With his Luminox watch and ability to take a beating in the line of duty, he’s tasked with figuring out what’s going on. He meets a “smart, beautiful and dangerous” woman named Raz Jackson in Paris. Raz is a former CIA agent who uses her old connections to provide upscale hotels and businesses with security systems. Raz and Rivers hit it off, but there’s still plenty of perilous work to be done. It soon becomes apparent that terrorists are planning an attack in the United States. A key conspirator is an American-born woman and former FBI/CIA asset called Susan Owens, who took classes in Arabic and Islamic studies at the University of Kentucky and now goes by the name Umm al-Nasr. In college, she befriended many people from the Middle East and wound up keeping an eye on them for the FBI. But she became radicalized while spending time in Damascus. She eventually married a top-ranking Islamic State terrorist known as Omar the Chechen, who was subsequently killed in a 2017 airstrike. Umm now has vengeance on her mind. She has no qualms about training girls to become suicide bombers and working with an unsavory Chechen named Dogu Matsoy, who aims to be the next Osama bin Laden. It will take concerted efforts by people like Rivers and Raz to prevent extensive bloodshed.

Naturally, Rivers encounters trouble wherever he goes in McQuay’s energetic tale. The dangers include all sorts of violent attacks, ranging from an attempted garroting in Odessa to a shootout in Tampa. The hero is often up against incredible odds, as when he’s wounded, alone in the Syrian desert, actively pursued by terrorists and “exposed in the open with a short-range AK and a close-contact handgun.” Such moments are undeniably tense. Readers will speculate how Rivers will manage to live to fight another day. What often keeps him alive is his training or what seems to be just plain good luck. Yet the bracing action can be broken up by tedious meetings and bureaucratic hurdles. While the fact that Rivers is not a rampaging gunslinger who can act with impunity whenever he wants lends the story believability, his interactions with his superiors are not always entertaining. Sometimes previous events wind up as bullet points for a report. Take, for example, part of the summation of the crime that begins the book: “Video shows one of the thieves decapitated the courier and other thieves appear agitated by the event.” Readers already know this information, and encountering it again doesn’t add much to the tale. Still, the story offers plenty of gripping scenes. Umm is not the typical Islamic terrorist found in spy thrillers, and she’s highly motivated to boot. Considering her ferocity, readers will wonder what it will take to finally stop her.

A riveting spy tale that delivers a CIA hero fighting Islamic terrorists.