Brian Andrews and Jeffery Wilson once again prove the excellence of their writing as they give us one of their most action-packed and boldest thrillers. Dempsey is my favorite of their Tier One/Team Ember series.
Set after the traumatizing events of Red Specter, we see the badass titular protagonist in a Russian gulag, missing from the face of the planet and missed dearly by his team. Under a carefully constructed guise, he is working undercover to accomplish what will be his most important mission yet; to assassinate the despotic and aggressive Russian president after his attempts to kickstart World War 3 by killing innocents. It will take the collective effort of Dempsey and his team of compatriots to pull this off, even if they have to do it from different parts of the world at once.
While Andrews and Wilson have always retained an emotional resonance in their action-packed stories, Dempsey is be the most personal one yet. The authors hone in on Dempsey’s predicaments of retaining his sanity and cover, both of which seem to progressively become mutually exclusive as he serves his time in the prison where he cannot let his guard down for even a second. In the course of the narrative, his spycraft becomes more and more polished as he reluctantly partners up the Russian spymaster in his mission, a partnership that puts him on edge as he learns to navigate the perilous game of trusting foes for a shared cause, after which there is no telling what may happen.
In addition to high emotional stakes, the narrative is rife with crisp and scrumptious action sequences that rival the best we could see on the big screen and in literature. From smooth trigger pulls to bullets whizzing past, the authentic and powerful combat sequences will put a smile on your face as you visualize the badass protagonists dish it out with the bad guys in the most realistically badass ways one could fathom.
Dempsey is a shining beacon of high-class writing in the thriller genre and it’s bound to go on the best of 2023 action-thriller list.
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