Published by St. Martin's Press on December 16, 2025
Rick Campbell’s Trident Deception novels are in equal measures spy stories, action stories, and submarine warfare stories. This is a pleasant blend of genres I enjoy, but Campbell excels at underwater action. Submarines are the reason I look forward to these novels.
Vengeance begins with an assassin shooting the Secretary of Defense moments after he threatened sanctions against Russia. Video analysis reveals that former Navy SEAL Lonnie Mixell was the shooter. Mixell recently murdered the wife of his former best friend and fellow SEAL, series protagonist Jake Harrison. The protagonist checks all the boxes that action novel authors seem to require, in that he’s named Jake (Jack being an acceptable alternative) and is a former SEAL (any other special forces background being an acceptable alternative).
Jake blames his former girlfriend, CIA Director Christine O’Connor, for his wife’s death and has made himself scarce. O’Connor would normally task Jake and specialized skills officer Khalila Dufour with finding Mixell, but Jake is in the wind and Khalila is in hot water for killing the CIA’s Deputy Director of Operations. Christine decides the Agency needs to track down Jake and get him on the case.
In an earlier novel, Brenda Verbeck was forced to resign as Secretary of the Navy after she tried to cover up her brother’s plot to sell centrifuges to Iran. Although she arranged for witnesses against her brother to die and is lucky not to be in prison, she has a bug up her bum about the president’s refusal to stand behind her. Now Verbeck wants Mixell to assassinate the president. Her hairbrained scheme drives much of the story.
The last significant plot element involves the new Russian president and his plan to invade Ukraine. In this fictional version of reality (one in which the US has fought recent naval battles against Russia), the US assesses Russia’s limited objective as capturing a corridor that links Crimea to Russia rather than a wholesale invasion of Ukraine. The US persuades NATO countries to back sanctions against Russia, which Russia intends to counter by sinking oil transports that travel through the Gulf of Hormuz, forcing western nations to buy Russian oil and gas. This gives Campbell a chance to bring back series regular Murray Wilson, captain of the submarine USS Michigan.
Jake’s first mission is to lead a team charged with destroying centrifuges that Iran received from Russia and installed inside a mountain complex. The fictional president is concerned that bunker-buster bombs won’t penetrate with sufficient depth to do the job, creating the need for Jake’s heroics. They must escape the mountain before the timer-activated explosives detonate, promoting typical thriller tension as the heroes encounter obstacles to the successful completion of their mission.
It's a bit disappointing (or at least it was to me) that a submarine doesn’t enter the plot until chapter 30 (of 89). When a Russian sub starts sinking tankers, the US Navy makes an ineffective response. Submarines make no significant return until chapter 47 while the Michigan plays no significant role until chapter 54. The action is furious after that point. I always enjoy scenes involving two submarine captains devising strategies as they try to blow each other out of the water. Submarine warfare dominates the novel’s second half.
Jake has another chance to play hero when Mixell seeks vengeance for the events in an earlier novel that caused the death of Mixell’s lover, events that Mixell blames upon Jake and Christine. As is common in modern thrillers, the plot depends on a number of improbabilities, including Christine’s convenient presence when Mixell tries to orchestrate his assassination plot. I suppose her capture by Mixell as part of his vengeance scheme is an inevitable conclusion to a story arc involving Jake, Christine, and Mixell. Jake’s response is the predictable fare of action thrillers.
Also improbable is Russia’s attack on civilian shipping and its effort to sink an American aircraft carrier. Why doesn’t this act of war spark a direct American (and likely NATO) assault on Russia? I suppose Campbell didn’t want to go there because — although the series is already an alternate history — a departure from the real world of that magnitude would turn it into science fiction. Still, the president’s response is both less vigorous than the circumstances warrant and pleasantly at odds with the current president’s indifference to Ukraine.
The series has made a point of telling the reader that Jake always loved Christine and only married his wife because Christine twice turned down his marriage proposals before he gave up and married someone else. That dynamic is also resolved in this book, although I won’t spoil the outcome for those who can’t guess it. The interplay of Jake and Christine (with a brief glimpse of Jake in bed with Khalila) has grown a bit tedious, so I was glad to see it end. Jake’s decision to shag Khalila is interesting, given that Khalila was thinking about killing him in an earlier book. She’s toned down her psychopathic tendencies, which actually makes her a less interesting character, although she manages to indulge her darker instincts before the story ends.
The political machinations and the soap operatic drama involving Jake and Christine have always been secondary to my enjoyment of the submarine warfare in this series. The former plot elements are about average for a modern thriller and would in themselves warrant a mild recommendation to thriller fans. To fans of submarine stories, however, I give a much stronger recommendation for this novel and the series as a whole.
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