The Bottom Line: A taut action thriller with scorchingly funny scenes, Ford delivers his best Agent Series book yet.
Dan J Ford’s Rogue Agent introduced us to Tom Wiseman, a one-man wrecking crew in an exceptional series debut. Ford’s second Agent Series book, Fugitive Agent, opens with a flashback that lays the groundwork for the book’s primary struggle. In a bar, we see former FBI boss and mentor, Special Agent Olsen, handing off a confidential informant named Yousef (aka Chameleon) to his junior Agent, Tom. “This is going to work out fine,” his boss predicts, a notion that is reinforced by Yousef’s highly suspect assurances: “We will do great things, Tom Wiseman.”
In the present, Tom is having an existential moment. Now in his late thirties, he is transitioning from an active service career into civilian life, with his new partner Shelly, her teenage foster daughter Charlie, and an aging retriever named Rufus. Tom is also highly irritable, both because he’s fighting a Vicodin addiction from his service life, and also because he’s simply unaccustomed and unsuited to the unpleasantries of normal domestic life. Still, he’s trying hard and has even helped Shelly plan a sweet sixteen birthday party for Charlie at City Lanes, the local bowling alley.
Worlds collide at City Lanes when a van pulls up. Heavily armed men in balaclavas approach and Tom scrambles to meet them outside. It comes as no surprise that Yousef reveals himself. He’s in full-creep mode, telling Tom that Charlie is “ripe enough to discover the world’s beauty, and its harsh realities” just before ordering his goons to go inside and kill everyone. But Tom isn’t about to let harm come to his new family unit without a fight. What follows is a tightly plotted and highly enjoyable action thriller, where Tom must evade Yousef and his killers, and an FBI manhunt, while uncovering the depths of Yousef’s treachery when he was an FBI confidential informant, and a sleeper agent.
Ford invests ample time in Tom’s exploration of whether he is even capable of having a normal domestic life. This includes hyper-realistic banter about everything from chauffeuring Charlie’s friends around, to pre-ordering food via City Lane’s AI assistant (Tom is a technophobe), to giving advice to a painfully awkward teenager wearing a retainer. While these scenes are hilarious, Tom is so awful at much of it (he hilariously calls the bowling alley’s service AI a “digital fucktard” flicking its head on the screen when it keeps getting his order wrong), that Yousef’s arrival seems almost like destiny — and it turns the story from a giggle to yourself page-turner, into an edge-of-your-seat thriller.
The book’s best surprise is without question teenage Charlie, a technical wunderkind who is forbidden from hacking, but who ends up being essential to Tom’s mission. While delivering loads of levity to numerous scenes in a way that only a precocious teenager can, Charlie also delivers the best line by far, and to the head of the FBI no less (“Take a suppository chill pill, grandad…Big D (another hacker) and I are about to crack this nut for ya”).
Ford manages to keep the stakes, and humor high throughout, and his Agent Series is one not to miss. Start with Book 1, Rogue Agent as the main storyline and most of the key characters carry over from there.
