Deep Cover is a fast-paced, adrenaline-pumping, revenge-fueled, action-packed thriller that elevates the espionage action thriller genre a notch or two.
Picking up from the fresh events of The Trigger Man, Mark Pierce, the former CIA paramilitary officer is tortured over a time span of months at the order of a treacherous CIA spymaster out for his own financial gain. Pierce, aptly code-named Trigger Man, wakes up to find himself in a car, with dangerous criminals planning on putting a bullet in his head. What follows is a spectacular action sequence where Pierce takes out his foes efficiently with punches, kicks, and bullets. Pierce finds a surprise in the trunk of the car, an Asian woman tied up by the gangsters. But he has to decide quickly if he can trust all that she seems to be as he faces off against the traitorous spymaster, a spoiled brat in charge of a diamond mining company, an African warlord, and a group of mercenaries all in cahoots to frame Pierce for theft of nuclear waste with a sinister and horrifying plan.
Aiden Bailey couples the highly intense plot with brutal hand-to-hand combat sequences in a variety of techniques and excellent shootouts with armament fitted appropriately to the exotic locales in the book. Speaking of exotic locales, one of the stellar aspects of the book is the use of exotic locations that are not commonly featured in action thrillers. While the story is set on African Continent for the most part, the different cities explored are done so with extensive research on the author’s part, so much so that one can be fully immersed in a location at any given point with just the right amount of information about the environment in a fast-paced action thriller.
Bailey distinguishes Deep Cover from a straight shoot-em up action fest with its depiction of inhumane horrors in the African warlords governed areas to the philosophical insights in the mind of Pierce as he contemplates revenge and terror. Despite the grand-scale plot, Bailey humbles his protagonist with tremors that get in his way when he’s amped up as he must be to survive the countless action sequences. It comes across wonderfully as the stakes feel higher and the combat more intense, a beautiful but haunting display of a crack in Pierce’s armor.
It flows off the pages that Aiden Bailey has grand plans for his series, taking Trigger Man on global adventures with heart-pounding and cinematic action sequences and characters that continue to evolve spectacularly, so much so that you feel deeply invested in the outcome. The cliffhanger once again shakes things for Trigger Man, and I am keen to find out where he lands next.
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