Published by Berkley on February 18, 2020
You know what you’re getting when you read a Gray Man novel. An abundance of action, a fair amount of mayhem, and a story that blows past the boundaries of plausibility. You also know that characterization is rudimentary, with the exception of the protagonist, whose personality is well established. Court Gentry is an action hero, not an introspective character who cares about personal growth. He knows what he knows and that’s all he’ll ever know. He’s happy with that, so why should readers complain?
I don’t follow many unidimensional action heroes, but there are a few I find entertaining. The Gray Man series is on that list. Few action thriller writers actually deliver thrills. Mark Greaney is one of them. I don’t care that the action is implausible because the story moves so quickly that I don’t have time to think about it.
The Violator, a/k/a the Gray Man, a/k/a Gentry, is hired to kill a retired Serbian war criminal by people who think he deserves to be dead. Killing people is Gentry’s thing, and if he’s paid to do it, all the better. Of course, he only kills people who deserve it, and to some minds, that makes it okay. To my mind, fretting about Gentry’s morality— he doesn’t claim to have any — would get in the way of the story.
As he’s getting ready to take the shot, Gentry goes against his instincts and noses around because he senses something’s not right. When he investigates, he discovers a couple of dozen women and girls who are shackled to the floor. He learns that the women are being trafficked as sex slaves — a popular thriller theme in recent years — and that the women are likely to pay a price for the mayhem he is causing. Gentry doesn’t have the resources to rescue a dozen women from a hellhole, but after he kills the war criminal and makes his escape, he feels guilty about whatever grief he might have caused them.
Gentry eventually hooks up with a female EUROPOL analyst named Talyssa Corbu. She’s usually tracking down financial criminals, but she’s freelancing in an effort to take down the sex slave pipeline. She has a personal stake because she enlisted her sister to cozy up to one of the leaders of the Consortium that manages this billion-dollar enterprise, and her sister, not being trained as a spy, got herself kidnapped and added to the stable of sex slaves. Talyssa eventually uses her skills at following the money to help Gentry use his skills at killing bad guys.
To follow the kidnapped girls, Gentry chases after and boards a yacht, then tries to figure out how to infiltrate a heavily guarded way station for enslaved women in Italy. In the meantime, the CIA has an important mission for Gentry and needs him to come home. To that end, a team is sent to Italy to bring him home against his will. All of this is just an excuse for chase scenes, gun battles, underwater chase scenes involving gun battles, and . . . you get the idea. By the time it’s all over, Gentry is in California and a lot of people are dead.
The highlight comes near the end when Gentry enlists some over-the-hill action heroes and a geriatric helicopter pilot to help him assault a rich man’s estate. The story isn’t even slightly plausible but it is richly entertaining. I wouldn’t rate One Minute Out as my favorite Gray Man novel, but it is much better than the bulk of action hero thrillers, the ones I typically abandon after twenty pages because the protagonists are so self-righteous and full of themselves. Yeah, Gentry knows he’s the baddest assassin out there, but he doesn’t make a big deal out of it. He is who he is, and Greaney’s emphasis isn’t so much on what a great patriot Gentry is (that’s an understated given) or how he’s a great American hero (debatable, even in Gentry’s mind), but on how much fun he can deliver to the reader by having Gentry break things and kill bad guys.
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