Series: Book 1 in the Mitch Rapp series
Rating: ****
Tags: General, Fiction, Lang:en
Summary
#1
New York Times bestselling author Vince Flynn
delivers a heart-pounding novel that poses an alarming and
timely question right out of today’s headlines: What
if America’s most powerful leader was also its prime
target?
TRANSFER OF POWER On a busy Washington morning, the stately calm of the
White House is shattered in a deadly terrorist attack on the
executive mansion. The president is evacuated to an
underground bunker, but not before nearly one hundred
hostages are taken. Mitch Rapp, the CIA’s top
counterterrorism operative sent in to take control of the
crisis, determines that the president is not as safe as
Washington’s power elite had thought. Indeed, Rapp has
made a chilling discovery that could rock Washington to its
core: someone within his own government wants his rescue
attempt to fail. In this long political thriller staged almost entirely
around a hostage standoff, Flynn makes maximum use of his
White House setting, and mixes in a spicy broth of brutal
terrorists, heroic commandos and enough secret agent hijinks
to keep the confrontation bubbling until its flag-raising
end. The villains are led by Rafique Aziz, a notorious Arab
terrorist whose band of thugs takes over the White House by
finding a weak point in American politics: they pose as
wealthy campaign contributors and are welcomed through the
front door. President Robert Hayes manages to escape to his
bunker moments before the bloodbath, but religious zealot
Aziz takes almost 100 hostages, seals off the White House and
begins making demands, of which large sums of cash are just
the beginning. With the president incommunicado and
weak-willed yet power hungry Vice President Sherman Baxter in
charge, the Pentagon and the CIA resort to their secret
weapon: commando extraordinaire Mitch Rapp. After sneaking
into the bowels of the Executive Mansion through an air duct,
Rapp steadily disrupts the terrorists' well-laid plans. He
finally calls in reinforcements when Aziz begins drilling
into the president's bunker. It's a long haul to the finish,
but Flynn (Term Limits) compensates for some stereotyping by
creating dynamic tension between the main players, especially
between military leaders and politicians, and between Rapp
and Aziz. His description of the White House is impressive;
readers will wonder if the secret passageways, hidden rooms
and clever deception devices that help load this story with
seemingly endless intrigue, really exist. Agent, Sloan
Harris. 15-city author tour.
When terrorists crash White House security, the President
is swept away to an isolated underground bunker, and the Vice
President suddenly finds himself in charge. From the author
of the best-selling Term Limits.
From Publishers Weekly
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.From Library Journal
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.