Where I Liked the Story Better Than the Author

Agente exterior/ Foreign Agent by Brad Thor
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

(I read the Spanish version. I was fine with the translation; my comments will be focused on the story.)

I've never read Brad Thor before, and I found the story generally entertaining. Lots of flying around the world, international action, spy stuff, all of which I usually enjoy and more or less did here. I didn't love the pace, but part of that, no doubt, is how much slower I read in Spanish. Still, I didn't find as much to love as I thought I would. Yes, it's a thriller, with lots of action and intrigue; sure, I could picture it as a slick movie; but tbh, I think it would be a kinda boring movie, the kind you watch on a Sunday afternoon and then forget what it was called.

It's about that good in my head. It's possible I would have found it slightly more entertaining in English.

But I also might have enjoyed it more if I hadn't found the writer's tone suspect. It's not a surprise that his MC is conservative; he's a foreign agent fighting terrorists. That's the kind of guy that you get for such stuff, apparently. But the whole book seems to take for granted the kind of dude-bro, kick ass, rolling coal attitudes that I associate with ignorant and narrow-minded people on social media. This seems especially true with how comfortable the author seems to be with black sites and torture, which was treated with the same Go America! enthusiasm usually reserved for technology like aircraft carriers and missiles and night-vision goggles. But the frat boy tone emerges too in the way almost every woman in the story is gorgeous and ogled by the narrator in a very 1970s way. Are there no regular women in this universe? Why did he people his story with so many hot women? I found that grating. A bit icky, actually.

In fact, the tone of the whole thing, the worldview emerging from the authoritative voice, is so conservative and reactionary from page 1 to the end I had to google the author to discover--not surprisingly--that he works with a rightwing think-tank.

Doy. Of course he does.

Other readers might like this quite a bit. The books are popular, and I thought this had very good action scenes with convincing research behind it. I don't fault any of that--that's why I gave it 3 stars. I might even read another book by him again, see if there's more of what I liked and less of what I didn't.

But probably not.

View all my reviews