survivor

The Survivor is the 14th installment in the Mitch Rapp series written by Vince Flynn.* My wife asked me to pick this book up for her at the library while I was there but they didn't have it, and the librarian couldn't find it either. After doing some research on line, I found out that this was planned as the next in the series, but Vince Flynn didn't finish the manuscript before he died in June 2013.

According to Emily Bestler, who has this long title: Senior Vice President, Editor-In-Chief Emily Bestler Books, an imprint of Atria Books at Simon & Schuster, Simon & Schuster classified the then forthcoming Survivor book as postponed indefinitely, until they could look into it with Vince's family etc. The eventual solution was to turn to Kyle Mills to finish Flynn's manuscript, and they also contracted with him to write two more Mitch Rapp novels. This change of author credit may be why I had trouble finding this book at the library. My wife ended up buying it in paperback.

I've read a few of these if I remember correctly. But its been a while, the Mitch Rapp character didn't ring a bell with me. It could be that my wife has read all of them and I just see these titles around the house. Like a lot of series, there is a fair amount of spill over from previous stories into this one, so it assumes some prior knowledge of some of the basic facts from the previous books. After checking, I read the last one, so some of the character names did sound familiar, even if I don't remember them as characters.

Mitch Rapp works as a heavy for the CIA. He's your standard, slightly tortured, hard-to-kill bad ass, super spy. He puts a small team together, and does his best to play catch up on a huge--and widening--international plot to bring down the CIA, perpetrated by some bad hombres.** I found the bad guys to be a little TV-typical, and the action to be well scripted, but mostly predictable. It is what makes these books so fun and relaxing to read, however. I found myself spending extra time reading, just to see what would happen. Now, is that me really hanging on the edge of my seat to see what will happen next, or am I really on the edge of my seat waiting to see if I'm right about how it will end? Does it matter? I don't think it does. This isn't fine literature we're talking about, this is just fun.

And fun it is. Best wishes to Vince Flynn's friends and loved ones, and good luck to Kyle Mills as he takes on the mantle.


* Just to clarify, what I mean here is that Vince Flynn wrote all of the earlier Mitch Rapp Books. Kyle Mills has taken over where Flynn left off. 

** Is it okay to say that, when you're making fun of people who say stuff like that? I hope so.