TOTAL POWER

 5 stars out of 5

Tough-guy heroes - you know, the kind who get shot three

times and have one broken arm but still can take down a cadre of well-armed ne'er-do-wells with a length of rope and a pea shooter - always make great characters in my book. But I've never cared much when the action takes place in sandy, desolate and far-off countries like Afghanistan or Pakistan. So it is that for a while now, I've put two of my favorite authors - Brad Thor and Vince Flynn - on the back burner. Recently, I tried again, finishing Brad Thor's latest Near Dark and giving it a 5-star rating. Next up? The latest Vince Flynn - and it gets 5 stars as well.

Of course, Flynn didn't write it; the popular author passed away in 2013. Since then, the legacy has fallen under the pen of Kyle Mills, this being his sixth in the series featuring government-approved assassin Mitch Rapp. Honestly, I haven't read the other five, but if this is any example, he's doing an exemplary job. And this time, he picked a topic that's long been of considerable concern to me personally: the vulnerability of America's electric power grid. It's been speculated by those who know such things that if it were to be attacked in exactly the right (or maybe I should say wrong) way, the fallout (maybe I should say blackout) has the potential to bring the country to its knees.

And that's exactly the plan here. As the story begins, a man who has connections in high places is soliciting help from governments bent on causing harm to the United States; he has the means to put the power grid totally out of commission for the foreseeable future, but he needs the strong-arm help of a handful of willing individuals to pull it off. Meanwhile, Mitch is trying to capture another bad guy - and as it turns out, a bad guy who was on the way to meet up with the would-be grid destroyer. 

The situation ends up taking a turn for the worse, though, and the lights go out. That's bad enough; but with no electrical power, not much of anything works. Not computers, not gasoline pumps, not ATMs and not refrigerators or sewage processing plants. Worse, the powers-that-be in Washington have no plan for bringing the system back to life. Enter Mitch and his crew, who are now charged with (pun intended) doing what the government can't: get to the bottom of the situation before half of the country gets hungry enough to start chowing down on the other half.

Needless to say, it's an action-packed adventure every step of the way, making for a very entertaining and engrossing 380 pages - and prompting my promise to myself not to miss the next one.

Total Power by Kyle Mills (Atria/Emily Bestler Books, September 2020); 380 pp.