Wade Thorne is the lead agent of The Specialists.
This group is a private Intelligence organization, put together by a rich electronics magnate, and former Director of the CIA, named Marshall. It was created because he had during his tenure with the Agency come to feel that more could be done in the fight with terrorism and tyranny. Governments were hampered by bureaucracy, timidity, and often personal inclination, agendas, or greed. He strongly felt that evil grows in the absence of a watchful, vengeful hand. With his group of Specialists, that hand was the six people from an assortment of sources and each with considerable skill and experience.
Thorne is the leader and by far the main character in the series, although the others play vital co-starring roles. Thorne is an ex-CIA agent having served for eight years until a KGB agent killed his family. He was brought from retirement and given a chance to fight back at evil.
The others in the group are Kat Killinger, a former FBI agent, Ichi Yamagata, also an FBI agent who is an expert with swords, Roger Johnson, a much decorated African-American SEAL, Hershel Levine, a computer genius from Mossad, and Duncan Bancroft, an MI-6 agent with contacts around the world.
These five people follow Thorne as he takes the fight that Marshall was funding to the enemy rather than wait for the enemy to strike on its own terms. The only rules that Thorne has to play by is to destroy the danger and to win. He and his people are very good at doing that.
A young American is murdered in Berlin while investigating a theft of many millions during WWII. Knowing he had gotten too close to the truth, Marshall dispatches the Specialists to find who did the killings and, more importantly, who did the ordering.
A captured Iraqi terrorist has in his possession a list of American targets. Unknown is which of these are the top priorities. Also unknown is who is the one most likely to strike, Bin Laden, Abdel Salim, or a figure known only as the Scimitar.
An ocean liner is hijacked and its passengers are being thrown off two at a time. The Specialists respond quickly and find that this is the first of many attacks against American targets with the final one aiming for millions of deaths.
This series is a combination of hot-action espionage and explosive military action with a very high testosterone level. Mr. Cunningham is a proven expert in the action department and shows again that he can write this with the best.
The plots are rather standard and the characters are too stereotypical to be that much fun but for quick reads, these are not bad.
I prefer to shy away from military series since soldiers are not spies but this one had to be included since the characters were all from Intelligence backgrounds and the founder was the head of the Agency. But this really is a military series, not a spy series, which is why the grade is what it is.
For action and excitement, though, this series has it in abundance.