The Insider Threat by Brad Taylor

Published by Dutton on June 30, 2015

Brad Taylor builds his Taskforce novels using a reliable formula. Pike's team is sent on a mission. The Oversight Council squabbles about the mission. Pike is ordered not to do something and he ignores the order so that he can complete the mission or he changes the mission to save lives or to save a team member. Pike's team members (particularly Knuckles) are wary of Pike's relationship with Jennifer and Jennifer is wary of their testosterone-laden view of the world. The Insider Threat follows that formula. It is about average for a Taskforce novel, which makes it better than most other thrillers about Americans who save the world from terrorists using their wits, high tech gadgetry, and state-of-the-art weapons.

Although the key bad guys in The Insider Threat are recruits of Islamic State, they are also Americans. Three of them escaped from a Florida reform school and consider their Islamic State recruitment to be joining another gang, albeit one that will give greater meaning to their violence. That's a clever spin that allows Taylor to avoid the obvious plots that burden similar thrillers, but I can't say he ever sold me on this one. Disenfranchised Americans do join radical causes, both foreign and domestic, but the motivation for these particular young men to give their allegiance (and lives) to Islamic State seems a bit thin.

Still, the plot is fun and the Lost Boys' target -- which becomes known to the reader with only a hundred pages remaining -- is not what I expected. Brad Taylor continues to avoid stereotyping when he creates his bad guys. They are always unique individuals with complex and convincing motivations, unlike the terrorist caricatures found in most novels of this nature.

The Insider Threat brings back Mossad's deadly Shoshana, setting up an interesting conflict with Jennifer, who is always the series' moral touchstone. Shoshana believes that slaughtering bad guys makes the world a better place while Jennifer argues that slaughtering bad guys makes you a bad guy. Jennifer never makes the mistake of dismissing innocent human beings as "collateral damage" simply because they aren't Americans. Yet Shoshana shows a bit of her own moral enlightenment as she explains the circumstances under which she refused to kill under Mossad's command. It is that sort of subtle thought that keeps me coming back to Brad Taylor while turning away from writers who see the conflict between good and evil in simplistic terms.

The Insider Threat lacks the imagination displayed in the best novels in this series. The ending reaches a predictable result via a mildly surprising path, but one of the final scenes is a bit hokey (unusual in a Taylor novel). The justification for Pike's team doing all the rescuing instead of swarming the target with police (or moving the target) is slim. Taylor has been cranking these books out at a phenomenal rate and this one seems a bit rushed. Having said that, I enjoyed the novel despite its flaws and I suspect most fans of the series will also have fun reading it.

RECOMMENDED