Sentinel

June 11, 2012
In Dunn’s solid second contemporary thriller featuring MI6 master spy Will Cochrane (after 2011’s Spycatcher), Will (code name Spartan) teams with the only other MI6 spy on his level, the mysterious agent known as Sentinel, in an effort to kill Russian Taras Khmelnytsky (code name Razin), “a colonel and the head of Spetsnaz Alpha,” who’s been murdering Sentinel’s 10 most valuable double agents in Central and Eastern Europe one-by-one. Razin is also training a unit to deliver small nuclear bombs to start a war with America with the ultimate goal of promoting his own political ambitions. Dunn, a former MI6 field officer, skillfully handles the usual spy business—uncovering high-placed traitors, blowing the other guy up, fighting one-on-one, and crossing and double-crossing each other. He has also wisely scaled back the almost superhuman capabilities Will displayed in Spycatcher, matching him with a deadly adversary who’s his equal, though some readers may feel Will has become too emotionally vulnerable. Agent: Logo Bonomi.

March 1, 2012

Back after the pointed and scalding Spycatcher, agent Will Cochrane is on his way to Russia, sent on an impossible mission by the CIA to find an undercover agent who has sent a cryptic message: "He has betrayed us and wants to go to war." The agent is bleeding to death when Cochrane finds him, but he manages to spit out one last word: "Sentinel." And the hunt is on. This former M16 agent gets a 150,000-copy first printing for his second novel; ante up.

Copyright 2012 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

August 1, 2012
In the successor to Spycatcher (2011), Will Cochrane, Spartan, the most effective and deadliest intelligence operative in the West, is alerted by his joint MI6-CIA handlers that war between Russia and the U.S. is imminent. An ambitious Spetsnaz colonel is planning to use newly designed suitcase nukes to trigger a war that will kill millions of Americans and Russians, return Russia to superpower status, and make the colonel Russia's next president. Spartan, of course, must stop him. Dunn uses the same formula as before. Spartan dashes from Langley, Virginia, to half a dozen Eastern European countries, engaging in armed and unarmed conflict while ruing the absence of life's simple pleasures. But Sentinel adds a few new elements. Cochrane's first clash with the Spetsnaz colonel convinces him that he cannot defeat the Russian mano a mano, and this flash of self-doubt adds to Will's appeal. Cochrane also meets his near-mythic predecessor, the original Spartan, and, as in Spycatcher, Dunn's action scenes are vividly drawn. Lovers of nearly superhuman derring-do will love this series.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2012, American Library Association.)