THE INVISIBLE by Andrew Britton

Good morning bookies! Your friendly neighborhood bookseller is pretty tired today. He spent most of yesterday and into the wee hours this morning helping someone move, waking up to rain and cold weather. Yesterday's high was 71, tonight we may have snow, Wednesday back into the low 70's. West Tennessee weather is rarely dull.

Before posting today's review, I should explain the format for most of these. Right now the reviews I'm putting up were mostly done for iloveamysterynewsletter.com. They all need to be of a certain length, I generally shoot for 300-400 words. Given that, there isn't time to do major in-depth examination, and I don't want to give away major plot points, so instead I shoot for an overall feel of the author and his/her work. Sometimes I get there, sometimes not, that's for you to judge.

THE INVISIBLE by Andrew Britton

Ryan Kealey has had enough. After almost being killed thwarting a terrorist attack in New York City, an attack that wounded his girlfriend and estranged the pair, he disappeared into the wildernesses of the world, seeking solitude and maybe even peace. The shadow world of the CIA was no longer his and he was glad.

Except that’s not how things work when you are a highly trained operative. In the Kashmir region of Pakistan a busload of western adventurers has gone missing, kidnapped, followed quickly by a violent attack on the motorcade of the US Secretary of State who had come to discuss measures to retrieve the hostages. The US ambassador is killed and the Secretary is also in the hands of the terrorists. But the Pakistanis are not happy with the US over an arms deal with India and their cooperation is lukewarm, at best. What is needed is a small team of experts to covertly infiltrate Pakistan and find the Secretary. What is needed is Ryan Kealey.

Given the chance to re-unite with his girlfriend, Naomi, on the mission, Kealey signs on and gets to work. But there are things he doesn’t know and other things he wasn’t told, things that might get him and his team killed, and he’s not happy about it. A fact-finding mission to Spain leads to a much higher price than anyone had anticipated.

The action is realistic, the characters well though out and the locales quite believable. For those who love the genre of action thrillers, Britton is certainly a new voice that commands attention. One might wish for some judicious editing, the descriptions do occasionally bog down in unnecessary detail, but that’s a quibble. The Invisible is an entertaining read with thought-provoking overtones, which is exactly what you would hope for.