"The Devil's Hand" by Jack Carr

I completed reading this book today.

Fourth in the series of Park City, UT based Jack Carr's novel's featuring former Navy Seal and current CIA deep cover agent James Reece.

President Alec Christensen wants to bring order to post Covid world.  Having personally suffered the loss of fiancee during the 9/11 attacks, he contrives a plan to obtain final retribution for his loss.  He brings in James Reece, who also seeks revenge for the murder of his wife, child and best friend, and hands him an assassination list of 9/11 plotters who have so far escaped justice.  Reece understands that the undercover mission will never be acknowledge publicly.

Meanwhile, Iran plots a bio-weapon attack on the United States in a fashion where the disease breakout will seem a natural occurrence.  Iranian operatives have stolen a sample of a deadly Russian-developed virus.  They plan to manufacture additional doses of the virus and have Iranian extremists spray it into the air of a few select US cities.  The Iranians expect that the US government will assume that the virus, like COVID-19, will be spread by air-born droplets spread person to person.  The expectation is that in order to contain the virus, the US government will be forced to surround the infected areas to ensure that no one escapes and spreads the virus, and then they will be forced to bomb their own infected cities into oblivion.

In a third thread, Christensen's political enemy, Senator Thwaites, learns of the President's plot.  Using Defense Department contacts, Twhaites attempts to thwart (:-)  the President's plan.

The above three threads intersect at various points in the novel.

Where the original charge to Reece was an assassination list, Reece is now charged with stopping the Iranian virus plot before considerable damage is done.

As a former SEAL, Jack Carr describes every element backing the plot in great detail:  weapons, political organizations.  There is hand to hand combat.  There are comprehensive descriptions of global foreign policy issues and the flaws of government response to crises.  

Violence and revenge are glorified.  The hyper successful TV series Yellowstone glorifies violence and revenge.  The success of podcaster Joe Rogan's popularity depends, at least in part, on his aggressive male attributes which include cage fighting and big game hunting (Rogan is also authentic as a person, which also contributes to his popularity).  In an era where the broader culture scorns so-called toxic male behavior and where many males are adrift and without work, culturally unmoored males might look to Rogan, Yellowstone, and Carr as depicting role models at odds with cultural trends that seem to suppress aggressive male behavior... hence the growing success of strong male, revenge oriented themes in media, novels and video.

Carr depicts Muslims as monolithically anti West... the enemy.  This depiction may irk many with multicultural sensibilities.  

Carr's narratives are, well, antigovernment.  In all of Carr's books the US government is corrupt, deceitful, careless, and guilty of stupid motivations.  This theme also plays well to large numbers of Americans today who, at least according to the polls, show markedly deteriorating levels of trust in US government institutions.

Reece and allies solve the Iranian plot with the help of quickly sourced epidemiological input.

Reece, like Lee Child's Reacher, is making its way to streaming video.  Chris Pratt will play Reece based on Carr's first Reece novel, "The Terminal List."  Pratt:  “Take my word for it, James Reece is one rowdy motherf***er. Get ready!”    And Rogan (it figures):  “They’re (Terminal List series episodes) great, man. They lock you in. They’re gripping.”   I agree with these characterizations and look forward to the video series and to Carr's next Reece novel.