Synopsis
Hailed by Tom Clancy as a novelist who is fast becoming "the new master of gripping and intelligent page-turners," Kyle Mills is at the forefront of America's hot new thriller writers. His New York Times bestsellers Storming Heaven and Burn Factor showed Mills to be a storyteller of breathless pacing, stylish prose, and chilling effectiveness. In Sphere of Influence , he takes FBI agent Mark Beamon into unnervingly hazardous territory, with shattering results. After years of putting truth ahead of protocol, Mark Beamon is languishing in a dead-end job in the Bureau's Phoenix office. But before he can officially be put out to pasture, he's called in for one final assignment. It was supposed to have been fun—a quick undercover job that would temporarily free Beamon from managerial hell. But now his young partner is dead and the FBI is strangely reluctant to ask the questions that could bring his killers to justice. Determined to find the truth even if it destroys him, Beamon plunges headlong into a world of drug trafficking, government corruption, murder, and betrayal. As he penetrates deeper he finds himself tumbling further and further into the undercover persona created for him—that of a cold blooded mercenary known only as Nicolai. Too deep, perhaps, to ever return. When Beamon discovers the existence of the mysterious Christian Volkov—a master criminal and a man with seemingly limitless power—it quickly becomes clear that only through him will Beamon be able to avenge his friend's death and unravel the conspiracy threatening his country. Trapped where the line between international organized crime and world politics blurs hopelessly, Beamon discovers that the stakes are much higher than he ever imagined. And that the enemy is much closer than he thinks.
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About the Author
Kyle Mills lives in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, where he spends his time skiing, rock climbing and writing books.
From Booklist
*Starred Review* FBI agent Mark Beamon was once considered the best investigator in the bureau. He also set new standards for ignoring protocol and embarrassing his superiors. That's why his career is stalled in middle-management hell as the head of the Bureau's Phoenix office. Then he gets a call from his former lover, Laura Vilechi, who is the lead FBI investigator in a new al-Qaeda crisis. The terrorists have cobbled together a rocket launcher inside the U.S and also have four operational rockets. She needs Mark's investigative skills to find the launcher before hundreds, maybe thousands, of Americans are killed in a September 11 redux. The lead she has Mark follow trails back through a botched drug deal and eventually places him undercover in the Russian crime organization run by Christian Volkov. It's there he learns that the CIA, employing its standard tortured logic, laid the groundwork for the latest al-Qaeda plot by disrupting the world heroin market. Beamon and Volkov form an uneasy alliance in which he will help Beamon discover the launcher location if Beamon will help him retain control of the heroin market. This is a brilliant modern crime thriller with a byzantine--yet believable--plot, a plucky hero, and villains who manipulate world events from their lofty positions in government. Mills does the large-scale thriller better than anyone else working the genre today. As a matter of fact, he may do it better than anyone who's ever sent a character out to save the world. Wes Lukowsky
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