Review: Executive Power by Vince Flynn

Series:
Mitch Rapp 6

My version:
Paperback
Fiction Thriller, Politics
Simon & Schuster
2003
Bought

Your cover’s blown.

The whole world is after you.

Where do you run to next?

Time is running out for Mitch Rapp. Publicly hailed by the President of the United States as the single most important person in the war against terror, the CIA super agent has become the target of every terrorist from Jakarta to London. And now everyone knows who he is and what he looks like.

A greater threat still lurks: an unknown assassin is working with the most dangerous powers in the Middle East to set the region – and the world – alight. Only Rapp can stop them.

But how can an undercover agent operate when the enemy already has him in their sights?

So, why all the titles with Power in them? The third is Transfer of Power, number five is Separation of Power, number six, Executive Power. I wondered at one point if it was something to do with parts of the US constitution relating to the office of President, but I’m not sure. I don’t know the US constitution all that well. I don’t know it at all, actually. Well, apart from the amendment about guns law was so that people out in the wilds (as all US was at the time), were allowed to keep a musket ready in case the Ye Olde British attacked again. Absolutely not meant as a forever right to bear arms. And certainly it doesn’t say ‘you have the right to buy assault weapons claiming they’re for use in self-defence, without questioning why they’re called assault weapons, or from supermarkets without background checks.’ Muskets, yes. Assault rifles, no. So, they wonder why I laugh when there’s (another) report of a person being shot by their four-year-old finding their weapon and shooting them, or themselves. Ha! Or there’s the rubbed out bit after the ‘all men born equal’ bit. you know it, the bit that said ‘apart from our slaves.’ That’s there if you look closely.

But I digress.

Politics-wise, Flynn again sensibly stays pretty much out of it. All politicians are soft and only concerned with lining their own nests. We know that already. The soldiers and people around Rapp, only want to do what is right, for each and every innocent and not-innocent (mostly) American person. Shooting terrorists and freeing their own. As politicians are pretty universally frowned on here and in books like this, it really makes you wonder who is running the country. Who the sensible ones are. But that isn’t exclusive to the US. However, were I to take a running guess at VF’s politics, based on the ‘arguments’ for ‘getting off their ass and doing something,’ I’d guess he’d lean more towards Trump than Clinton. Not totally out in La-La Land like Brad Thor (I’d put my mortgage on that NOT being the name on his birth certificate, whaddaya think?) and the shaved orang-utan Trump, but more centre, if Yanks think Clinton is a ‘socialist.’ Anyway, he seems a decent enough guy all told.

Yet, Executive Power is without doubt Vince Flynn’s best Mitch Rapp book so far. And that’s good as the books do seem to be getting better and better (I’m reading them in the published order, so I’m writing as if this is the latest book. I know there are what? 15 more and VF is now dead). It’s his best by far. Better even, than American Assassin (the first)? Maybe, yeah. If Hurley and all the others who were in at the start but then…well, again, we don’t know because there’s still the 10 year black hole (maybe Steven Hawking should be commissioned to write books from that period?). Flynn’s writing, is tight and effective (whatever that means). Not sparse to the point of you wondering if they’ve cut bits out, not so sparse that you wonder if the book is trying to make an idiot of you because you can’t remember what that bloke was saying several hundred pages back that now you wish you could find to go read again otherwise you can’t figure out what’s going on. It’s mostly Thriller cliché-free and is now using the pieces that were set up in the previous books (well, from #3 onwards anyway) very nicely. And it makes me want to read more.

I STILL don’t do the wife bit. She’s holding Rapp back. Hope he sees it before it’s too late. And I don’t get the two strands either. Totally non-connected. They’re only there to show the clash between Rapp and Mrs Rapp. Which is the worst bit. She’s unreasonable. She’s clever enough, she should know better. I’ll have to read on to find out if he sees the light.

You can buy Executive Power from The Book Depository