Into the Fire

(Reprinted from April 12th, 2010)

First of all I love the Prelude in The Third Option. It’s a perfect setup for the third leg in this continuing Mitch Rapp saga by bestselling author Vince Flynn published in 2000. This story picks up a year after Transfer of Power, and Mitch Rapp is on assignment in Germany. He’s got that nagging feeling in his gut that something isn’t quite right, but while hoping this will be his final gig in service to his country, since he’s fallen in love with the reporter he rescued during the terrorist siege in the White House, the woman he’s working with turns on him and fires two bullets into his chest.

Mitch wrangles out of the mess like only he can do, but as he works his way back to the USA, he wonders if his oldest and most trusted friends in the CIA could possibly be responsible for this betrayal. Meanwhile one of those friends, Rapp’s elderly mentor and top CIA man Thomas Stansfield, is dying of cancer, but once he learns about what happened to Mitch he summons his final energy to solve the obvious leak in this most secretive of organizations.       

As an author it’s quite obvious Vince Flynn likes feisty women. In his fiction he creates two almost identical female characters in Congressman Michael O’Rourke’s wife and Mitch Rapp’s soon-to-be wife who also happen to be best friends. Both reporters, both headstrong and in-your-face to their men, both demanding to know secrets related to the government when their husbands are involved too deep to reveal information. As reporters they don’t think twice about protecting sources, yet when they’re the ones with the questions, they require answers which can’t be given without a potentially dreadful cost. This is probably my only difficulty with the Flynn stories so far. These women should know better, and I find their personalities too demonstrative in light of the particular circumstances of these two individual men.

I rarely comment on POV changes within stories, and Vince’s writing produces a lot of flip flops from one character to another. To date it rarely bothers me, and I don’t think it’s a sign of bad writing as many professionals insist. It could be argued the problem belongs more to a lazy reader who doesn’t want to be troubled by staying with the story wherever it leads. However, I will say there were a couple of swift transitions in this story where I had to go back a sentence or two to see if I was now in another character’s frame of mind. That didn’t happen in his other novels.

The Third Option leaves the reader dangling for the first time without resolution, laying the groundwork for the next book in line: Separation of Power. Mitch is given an “out” by Thomas Stansfield who convinces him he’s much too valuable to lose and being unable to refuse Thomas’s generous offer to remain with the Agency, he looks forward to his new life and a hint of normality. As a reader, I’m now anxious to know if Stansfield is going to last long enough to give Mitch the insight he needs to “be” The Third Option long enough to eliminate this villain which is unknown to Stansfield, Dr. Kennedy, and Mitch Rapp when the story ends.

 
God, each story reminds me of man’s lust for power, his overwhelming greed, and his inhumanity to one another. Vince Flynn captures it all in the gift of storytelling. I do pray this man knows you as you want to be known, and that eventually he works you into his stories. In the Name of Jesus, Amen.