Published by Dutton on January 15, 2013
Enemy of Mine does what an action novel needs to do: it delivers action. Along the way, it tells a surprisingly intelligent, carefully plotted story.
The prologue to Enemy of Mine begins with a nightmare (always a bad start to a novel) as Pike Logan dreams about the murder of his wife and child four years earlier. The main story begins with the assassination of an investigator who had gathered evidence implicating the Syrian government and Hezbollah in the 2005 death of Lebanon's prime minister. The assassin (a freelance terrorist known as the Ghost) then accepts an assignment to kill the American envoy to upcoming peace negotiations between the Palestinian Authority and Israel. A competing freelance assassin, an American named Lucas Kane but known by the code name Infidel, turns up to add spice to the plot. Pike encountered Infidel in One Rough Man.
Pike's ultimate mission, and that of the counter-terrorism Taskforce to which he is assigned, is to prevent the envoy's assassination. When they aren't with Pike, other members of the Taskforce come into focus, particularly Jennifer, an anthropologist who kicks butt when she isn't educating the other Taskforce members about world history. Knuckles and Decoy will also be familiar to series fans, while a new guy named Brett joins the team. Pike and Jennifer, however, are the only characters who gain new depth in this novel.
Occasionally the story spotlights Col. Kurt Hale, who commands the Taskforce from Washington D.C. Hale sits on an oversight committee that answers to the president (the only elected official on the committee). Since the Taskforce operates "outside the bounds of U.S. law" (it doesn't notify Congress or obtain Congressional approval before kidnapping or assassinating its targets), Hale and Pike and everyone else on the Taskforce, as well as the president and everyone on the oversight committee, is by definition a criminal. A reader needs to accept this unlikely premise (at least, one would hope it's unlikely) in order to enjoy the story. Since modern thrillers are almost always built on unlikely foundations, I rolled with it.
The main plot is cunning, bringing to mind (without overtly stating) the familiar Arabic proverb, "the enemy of my enemy is my friend." Of course, sometimes the enemy of your enemy is also your enemy. A couple of assassination schemes that unfold during the course of the novel are quite clever. The last quarter of the novel, after the main plot has wound down, seems like padding but it's enjoyable padding. A key subplot depends upon a wildly improbable coincidence that is easily forgiven since it drives the action at the end of the novel.
The story moves at a brisk pace. Brad Taylor's prose is straightforward but Enemy of Mine is about story, not style. The story is entertaining, although some events are predictable. Pike gets into bar fights to prove what a tough guy he is, just as he did in The Callsign. He risks his team and his cover to save a girl he doesn't know, after being ordered to cease operations, simultaneously proving his heroism and independence. In fact, Pike frequently disregards orders and never suffers any consequences because he always turns out to be right. Knuckles gives us the usual detailed description of the care a sniper takes to fire an accurate long-distance shot. The oversight committee is predictably bureaucratic in its refusal to trust the judgment of Taskforce members in the field. None of these scenes are bad, but they've all been done many times before.
Taylor has a more nuanced view of the world than some action novelists. He acknowledges that terrorists can be intelligent, that they do not share a unified ideology, and that the differing motivations of terrorist organizations lead them to pursue conflicting goals. Although Pike obviously disagrees with it, Taylor presents the Lebanese perspective on Hezbollah and the 2006 war with refreshing honesty, while Hale recognizes that there is a difference between the Palestinian Authority and Hamas. Unlike most action novel heroes, Pike knows that using torture as an interrogation technique is more likely to produce lies than truth. And unlike the vigilante "heroes" that populate so many thrillers, Pike has moral reservations about revenge killing, creating a dilemma when he experiences an overwhelming desire for revenge.
In short, this is an impressive action novel with a solid plot that reflects an unusually sophisticated worldview. On top of that, it's fun.
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