In my opinion, Assassin’s Edge is the best book Ward Larsen has ever written. Period. That’s as simple as I can put it. It is a stunning achievement in an already iconic series.
The writing is absorbing. The plot is adventurous. The warfare is asymmetrical. The intensity and danger are acute. It’s the full military/espionage thriller package.
In Assassin’s Edge, a U.S. spy plane crashes off the northern coast of Russia at the same time that a Mossad operative is abducted from a street in Kazakhstan. When wreckage from the aircraft is discovered on a remote Arctic island, Slaton and a team are sent on a clandestine mission to investigate. While they comb a frigid Russian island at the top of the world, disaster strikes yet again: a U.S. Navy destroyer sinks in the Black Sea. Evidence begins mounting that these disparate events are linked, controlled by an unseen hand.
After reading Slaton’s origin story in the novella Assassin’s Dawn this summer, I was absolutely champing at the bit for the next full length installment of the David Slaton series. When I got my hand’s on Assassin’s Edge I couldn’t stop reading until 4am. And it was worth every single second of lost sleep.
I applaud Ward for the unique perspective in this story. While experimental weaponry is nothing new to the thriller genre, the way he incorporated it and the manner in which the weapons were deployed was a completely fresh take and had my eyebrows raised more times than I can count.
My expectations are always rather lofty whenever I pick up a book by Ward. Not only did he exceed my expectations, he blew past them like a hypersonic missile. For me, this book proves that Larsen deserves to be mentioned with all of the big names in the genre. The writing and storytelling in this book are on a level that most closely resembles that of a Daniel Silva novel. And if you know how big of a fan of Silva I am… you know that I cannot give any higher praise to Ward on how phenomenal this book is. This is already one of my favorite books coming in 2022.
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