Cover of The Ghost War
You had to think Alex Berenson felt a little pressure on his second book. The first won an Edgar Award after all and ended with its hero saving New York City from a biological attack. How to top that?
In The Ghost War Berenson continues the exploits of John Wells while mixing in a little more geopolitical tension. Here is how Publishers Weekly describes it:
Having foiled an al-Qaeda plot targeting Times Square in 2006’s The Faithful Spy (which won an Edgar Award for best first novel), maverick CIA agent John Wells confronts a very different threat in this pulse-pounding sequel from New York Times reporter Berenson. When the CIA’s efforts to extract Dr. Sung Kwan, a North Korean scientist and an invaluable source on Kim Jong Il’s nuclear ambitions, result in the deaths of Kwan and the rescue team, Wells’s significant other, Jennifer Exley, searches to identify the person in U.S. intelligence who compromised Kwan’s security. Meanwhile, Wells returns to Afghanistan, the scene of much of the action in The Faithful Spy, to find out what outside country has been helping the Taliban reassert itself. While the mole hunt will be familiar to genre buffs and the characters and the perils they face aren’t as nuanced as those in John le Carré or even David Ignatius, the author’s plausible scenario distinguishes this from most spy thrillers.
If the first book was focused on the character of Wells, the second book is propelled more by the looming conflict between China and the US. It also introduces the stress and strains involved in the relationship between Wells and Exley.
Berenson continues to give you a variety of perspectives as you see the action through the eyes of multiple characters. As the plot points touched on by PW above reveal, he builds up a series of seemingly unrelated but ultimately interconnected threats and/or plot threads. North Korea, Afghanistan, Iran, and China all play a part.
But the big picture is China. The tension builds as Berenson lays out a plausible scenario whereby the US and China could find themselves on the brink of war.
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