Shadow Strike by Brad Taylor

Published by William Morrow on April 21, 2026

It’s been a minute since I last read a Pike Logan novel. They haven’t changed much, which is the sign of a series gone stale. To elevate the excitement, Pike and his team (with an assist from Mossad) help the world avoid not one, but three terrorist attacks, including the assassination of Israel’s prime minister and America’s secretary of state. Just another day in Thrillerworld.

Like other novels I’ve recently read that pit tough guys against Iranian or Lebanese terrorists, Shadow Strike is already dated. A scene near the end has Israeli fighter jets and bombers flying over Iran as the heroes worry about whether they’ll be shot down. That’s less of a worry now. Ironically, Brad Taylor notes at the novel’s end that his original plot was overtaken by events, so he needed to change it. The replacement plot still has some relevance to the real world but doesn’t account for the US joining with Isreal to attack Iran or for Israel’s relentless bombing of perceived Hezbollah targets in Lebanon.

So here’s the now dated story. After criminals who have the bad sense to steal Pike’s computer get their comeuppance — a mandatory introductory scene to establish tough guy bona fides — the plot swerves to a terrorist known as the Ghost. Pike captured the Ghost ten years earlier and Pike’s Taskforce, never even slightly concerned about obeying the law, stashed him in one of their own “black site” jails. Now the Ghost has escaped from custody in rural Utah with the assistance of a local biker gang. The overseers of the Taskforce are in a tizzy because the Ghost’s clandestine captivity, if revealed, could send a lot of people to prison (which, in a rational world, would be a sensible punishment for imprisoning a man without due process).

The Ghost’s biker-assisted escape was orchestrated by a faction of Hezbollah that needs an assassin who is off the radar. They apparently believe that ten years of captivity will not have dulled his skills. His assignment is to kill the prime minister of Israel while he’s attending a celebration in Argentina. The US secretary of state will also attend. She’s been known to bump uglies with Knuckles, a member of Pike’s team, but they have no opportunity to renew that acquaintance in this book.

The assassination plot is part of a three-headed terrorist attack. The second attack will occur in Washington D.C. Pike send Knuckles to stop it (even though the Taskforce has no domestic operational authority) because there are no federal law enforcement agents in D.C. who meet Pike’s standards of competence. It seemed to me that Knuckle’s contribution was something that others would likely have done, although Pike assures us that only Knuckles could have figured out how to thwart the far-fetched scheme.

The third attack involves a dirty bomb in Gaza, a false flag operation that even the Ghost views as extreme, given that Palestinians will be the victims. While Israel does the mopping up, it is Pike’s work that saves the day.

Pike is joined in Argentina by Aaron and Shoshana, Mossad agents who have made regular appearances in the series. Shoshana is a hotheaded psychopath who vibes well with Pike but is particularly enamored with his wife Jennifer. Shoshana sees auras around people, a superpower that the novel’s characters take seriously. Whether readers do so is unclear to me, although a surprising number of thriller writers like to give quasi-superpowers to some of their characters.

Everyone but Pike, Jennifer, and Aaron lives in fear of Shoshana, although she seems to have toned down her impulsive violence. Pike has anger management issues of his own, a trait that passes for character development in a tough guy who otherwise has little personality. When Pike feels his rage spike, he either kills someone or Jennifer talks him down, the fairer sex being the stereotypical antidote to toxic masculinity.

To be fair, Pike is not alone in his morally questionable approach to killing. Knuckles murders a wounded, helpless man near the novel’s end as an act of revenge. In Thrillerworld, that makes Knuckles “tough,” as opposed to morally impaired.

The story follows the series’ formula, in that Pike is ordered not to do things that he regards as necessary and so does them anyway, preferring to ask for forgiveness rather than permission. The plot is about as plausible as most modern thrillers (meaning not very), although it glosses over the Ghost’s ability to smuggle two suicide vests loaded with Semtex past multiple layers of security at the Jewish Center where Israel’s prime minister will speak. I also question the remarkable ease with which the terrorists nearly wipe out D.C. — if it’s as easy as the story suggests, I imagine it would have happened already.

In another scene, as Pike rushes to the Jewish Center with Soshana, he insists on fighting his way in when a quick phone call would have prevented the prime minister from taking the stage, thus ending the threat. Sometimes action heroes need to be action heroes to satisfy action junkies, but the scene is so devoid of credibility that it harms the story. Of course, that’s nothing new in Thrillerworld.

Setting aside my concerns that the story offers nothing new in this long-running series, I give Brad Taylor credit for adding occasional nuance to a fast-moving action story. I was particularly impressed with his ability to convey the Ghost’s moral ambiguity. He kills for a cause, not for pleasure, and his dedication to the Palestinian cause has been shaped by decades of oppression and loss. He longs for the simple life of a fishmonger, making him a surprisingly sympathetic version of a terrorist. The Ghost is more interesting than the protagonist, but that — as much as the action — makes the novel worth reading.

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