Believer opens with Reece sailing a one-man craft across the Atlantic Ocean with no real goal in mind. His enemies are dead and he believes himself to have a terminal brain tumor. But after some soul-searching, he heads for Mozambique, the last known address for a former friend and SEAL buddy, who may have a place where he can safely lay low while his life approaches its nearing end. Once he arrives and goes to ground, he starts helping his friend manage the large public and private game preserve under his care, planning out new and effective strategies for tracking and countering poachers. An incident during one attempt to ambush and capture a poaching crew exposes Reece to the people who've been looking for him, and eventually a man that he knows shows up at the hunting station. But not to take him in: To offer him a job hunting another former colleague who seems to be running a devastating and bloody terrorist ring responsible for several brutal attacks.
In this second book, Carr has Reece take a serious look at some of the tactics he used against the plotters who killed his unit and his family. The first third of the book, set on the game preserve in Mozambique, gives him a chance to put his skills to use to help people rather than simply hunt them down and he doesn't much care for some of what he did in order to wreak his vengeance. He risked innocent lives as well, and credit Carr for taking the narrative time to let these developments unspool. The middle section sags, as Reece joins his friend in retraining and discussing the various varieties of boomsticks they will use. Operational purists probably appreciate the accuracy of the descriptions offered by Carr, himself a retired SEAL and sniper team operator, but your humble blogger is not among that august body. Once Reece is back in the fight, however, Carr presses the pedal to the floor and delivers a straight-line "race against time to outwit the bad guys and oh, by the way, kick their behinds nine ways from Sunday" storyline.
True Believer is more polished, more tightly focused and more thoroughly thought out than its predecessor. It's also significantly more reflective, which may be a large part of why it improves over the first book. Carr still has some room to work on the polish and he still has a habit of lingering over some of the violence a little more than is seemly, but if subsequent books continue to step forward then he will be offering up several top-shelf thrillers in years to come.
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Ordinarily I am a big fan of Daniel Silva's novels about Gabriel Allon, one of Israel's top spies and most effective operatives. In order to explain why my opinion about The New Girl differs so widely from that norm, this review will spoil large parts of the book. Proceed accordingly.
Gabriel is approached by a woman he knows who wants him to meet with Khalid bin Muhammed, the seemingly reform-minded crown prince of Saudi Arabia. He's not interested in meeting with "KBM," a thinly-disguised stand-in for the real life crown prince Muhammed bin Salman, because the reforms have been overshadowed by KBM's murder of a journalist (as MBS is now frowned upon after orchestrating the death of Jamal Kashoggi). But he owes the woman, Sarah Bancroft, a favor or two for her previous work with his agency and agrees. In the meeting, he learns that the prince has a young daughter, Reema, who was the mysterious girl at the Swiss school, and she has been kidnapped by people who've given him just a couple of days to announce his abdication or she will be killed. Although he's not impressed with Khalid, Gabriel knows that any replacement is likely to be worse and roll back even the modest reforms the prince has tried. Given the chance to have the potential king of Saudi Arabia on his side, he activates his trusted team to hunt down and rescue Reema.
The New Girl works well to this point, highlighting the familiar strengths of Gabriel's friends and fellow operatives as he tries to learn where Reema is as well as who took her. But their failure to save the girl and Silva's choice to make her a point of view character as we see her realize she's been sewn inside a suicide vest as a means to kill her father provide a truly ugly and pointless pivot in the story. The trope of killing a character, usually female, only to motivate the male characters around her is called "fridging" after an ugly episode in a 1994 Green Lantern comic book that saw the hero's girlfriend brutally killed and stuffed into a refrigerator for no other reason than to give him a momentary tragedy.
Silva writes Reema's death only as a way of motivating Gabriel to hunt down the perpetrators and punish them, and as a way of motivating Khalid to become a more fit ruler and better human being. He adds her as a point of view character only to pile on the horror (as if describing her father, in shock, gathering up her severed limbs after the explosion and urging Gabriel to get them to a hospital is not horrid enough). The second half of the book, in which Gabriel sets up a sting to lure the kidnappers into his own plot to thwart the aims of their mastermind, is a little too twisty to be clear -- but it's tough to care overmuch after the grotesque misstep of Reema's senseless death.
The series I enjoy I tend to stick with, so I am pretty sure to pick up Gabriel Allon #20 when it comes out next year. If I were still keeping books the way I used to, would I keep The New Girl, or would #20 find itself next to #18 instead? I would probably decide to keep it, because I figure that's the least I could do in order to do better by Reema bint Khalid than Daniel Silva has done.
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