WILL COCHRANE

Will Cochrane is an agent with MI6.

He is considered by many, including his boss and handler, to be the agent for the British Intelligence bureau, so good that he has earned the codename of 'Spartan'. That title is, according to the storyline, the name given to only one agent at a time and meant to describe that operative as the most elite in the Service. He is also considered the most secret of identities. No one but his bosses know who he is. No one else is supposed to.

In the case of this particular Spartan, there is one other person who knows his identity and his position with MI6 and that is a key player in the CIA, a man who holds a position in his Agency that Cochrane's handler does in MI6. These two men have worked well together over the years dating back to the first Gulf War. Besides the friendship they have had and the various missions they have run together, they have another link that ties them together and with Cochrane. Nearly two decades before while on a mission in Iraq, they and Cochrane's father, also an agent, had run into an ambush. Cochrane's father had sacrificed himself to let them escape. Now they feel a debt to that man. They pay it back in an unusual way - they put his son into the toughest of situations.

Cochrane is capable of standing up to the challenge. Before he accepted the offer to work for the British, he had already honed his skills and perfected his craft in an unusual manner. When he was about 15, he came home to find intruders had broken into his family's home looking for money. His mother and sister had been attacked. All their lives were threatened. He was told to come up with the money the crooks were certain were hidden away. What he came up with to end the siege was a knife from the kitchen.

As soon as he was old enough, Cochrane left what home he still had. He chose the French Foreign Legion and more specifically, the most elite of that organization, its version of the Special Forces. He met their challenge and exceeded it and became one of the best they had ever seen. When his five-year hitch came up and MI6 came knocking, he took the offer.

Now he handles the impossible cases because he is the only one who can.

One initial piece of advice before reading this series is to just go with it. Do not expect logic from this over-the-top series because when the main character is shot in abdomen three times and it slows him down for only two days, well, enough said. Maybe a second suggestion could be to not look for a character who is at all sympathetic because you will not find that in Cochrane. The man is mouthy, sarcastic, obnoxious, demanding and more, all in the first few pages. He mellows out as the book goes on but initially a take on the man could easily be not as favorable as it might be desired, such that when he is shot early on, I for one was not too surprised nor upset.

This is the same Cochrane who in the second book is actually very interesting and enjoyable to read about. The mellowing seems to have stayed. He is still a big time hard-ass who is not to be trifled with but at least he is not snarling at literally everyone and promising to kill them if they got in his way. He would still probably kill them; he just would not make a issue of it.

My take on the first half of the first book is a very low one but it changed a lot in the second half and really improved in the second book. Things get a bunch better by the third. I think the author, a man whose background shows he know what he is talking about, is becoming better and better at the word business and that is a good thing. Cochrane is an interesting character or at least he is becoming one.

Addendum: After having read the next couple of books in this series after writing my comments above, my opinion of the improvement was not only validated, it was increased. The man can really write and I have upped my grade.