The Widow's Strike by Brad Taylor

Published by Dutton on July 16, 2013

When writers churn out novels with the speed that Brad Taylor has been adding to the Pike Logan series, there's usually a noticeable decline in quality from book to book. Surprisingly, Taylor's books are getting better. The Widow's Strike might be the best of them. It's exciting, intelligent, action-filled, and fast-moving. The story is plausible. The characters continue to evolve. They're forced to make tough decisions, the sort of decisions that have emotional consequences, and Taylor never makes the mistake of posturing his characters as robotic superhumans who are unaffected by their work. They aren't infallible, they second-guess their decisions, they have regrets. Taylor's ability to humanize his action heroes sets him apart from many other authors working in the same genre.

On loan to a Taskforce team that isn't his own, Knuckles has managed to get himself jailed in Thailand, a situation that Pike soon remedies. Since Pike and his team are already in Thailand, they're given a mission in Bangkok. The Taskforce target this time is General Malik Musavi of Iran's Qud Force. Although the Taskforce isn't certain what he's up to, the reader knows he's trying to obtain a mutated version of bird flu (the infamous H5N1 virus) to use as a biological weapon. That's been done before, but Taylor twists the story enough to make a familiar plot seem reasonably fresh.

A connecting plot thread concerns a Chechen suicide bomber. Pike and his team chase down clues that are spread across Thailand, Hong Kong, and Singapore before returning to the United States. Back home, a civilian member of the Taskforce's oversight council needs some oversight of his own.

As always, I'm impressed by Taylor's ability to get into the minds of Pike's enemies, to portray them as reasoning human beings rather than stereotypes of evil. And as he has in other novels, Taylor goes out of his way to expose the dull-witted intolerance of certain Americans who view foreign affairs in simplistic terms. But here, too, Taylor avoids stereotyping, taking care to point out that not all Americans are xenophobes or religious bigots.

The Widow's Strike follows the formula that drove the earlier Pike Logan novels: Pike's Taskforce team is sent on a mission with strict orders not to interfere with the target or do anything conspicuous; Pike decides the orders aren't useful and disregards them in favor of action; Pike's team prevents a worldwide catastrophe. It's a reliable formula, and while it might get old at some point, Taylor uses here with predictable but fun results.

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