THE HUNTERS

Griffin returns to chronicle the international adventures of heroic presidential special agent Charley Castillo (The Hostage, 2006).

Too modest and too rich to be just another rampaging Ollie North, Major C.G. “Charley,” polyglot love child of a German newspaper heiress and an even richer Texas aviator, has been charged by his doting president with the formation of a special-operations group answering only to the White House. The president wants Charley to clear up the mess left behind when he and his ragtag band of straight-shooting marines, honest CIA operatives, brainy Asian F.B.I. agents and their admiring Argentine opposite numbers located and almost snatched the perfidious high-level U.N. bureaucrat who absconded to rural Uruguay with 16 million dollars rightfully belonging to an international ring of oil-for-food swindlers. The snatch of the bureaucrat had been foiled by a black-clad gang of seemingly unidentifiable “Ninjas” armed with untraceable weapons, one of whom took out the bureaucrat even as Charley was reaching for him. The Ninjas were all wiped out, but the oil-for-food thieves want their money back and they want equally to eliminate anyone with clues about their identity, especially elderly Hungarian man-about-town and ace reporter Eric Kocian, a favorite of Charley’s. Armed with the disputed 16 million bucks snatched from the late bureaucrat’s secret accounts, girded with a promotion to Lt. Colonel and staffed with the best office administrator on the planet, Charley rounds up his troops and swears them into the new unit and off they fly in Charley’s Gulfstream, back and forth from Argentina to Germany to Hungary to Texas to Argentina to Uruguay, accompanied on much of the trip by Kocian’s huge and adorable Flemish sheepdog, until they at last clear up most of the mysteries, leaving just enough unsolved for a sequel.

Notable mostly for the digs at a CIA agent remarkably similar to Valerie Plame.