BRADY HAWK

Brady Hawk is an agent with Firestorm.

Firestorm is a black-ops organization within the U.S. Intelligence community responsible for operating in the shadows to take out those foreign enemies determined to destroy the Western world. It is headed by a powerful senator from Texas named Blunt who provides the funding through appropriations for an unspecified Project Z. Leading this project, codenamed Firestorm, is a military general named Johnson but there is no doubt in anyone's mind that it is Blunt who runs the show.

Hawk is one of three Firestorm operatives though the other two are considered by Blunt to be there more for a replacement to Hawk than as equals. Good agents though they be, to Blunt there is only one Brady Hawk and so it is Hawk who gets the toughest assignments and at Firestorm, all the jobs are tough.

Hawk did not need the job nor that dangers that came with it on every assignments. The son of a very wealthy arms manufacturer, he could have stayed home and either worked for daddy or just lived off his inheritance but then he would not be the kind of man that he was - driven to help no matter the risk.

The same independent and frankly stubborn gene that caused Hawk to walk away from a life of privilege for one of constant danger and almost certain death makes him a terrific agent and one certain to cause sleepless nights for his handlers. Those back home, like Alex who seems to spend each of her nights wondering what crazy stunt Hawk will pull next, know that no matter how good Hawk is, and he is very good, he is still human and killable. Luckily no one seems to have gotten the word to Hawk.

Well into the collection of adventures of Brady Hawk, the organization Firestorm will be disbanded. Hawk will be offered a position with a new private sector company called the Phoenix Foundation. "Officially, [it] was a consulting group, another Washington think tank in a city awash with overpaid idea makers. The organization could exist in plain sight, and no one would even question its purpose or existence. To make the mirage more believable, there was a staff, including several former military generals who met with government lackeys about security matters. They also worked with defense contractors to make sure that new weaponry in development was practical in the age of modern warfare. In reality, the group was a slick way to funnel government funds to a clandestine operation without anyone suspecting a thing. Every year, The Phoenix Foundation would win a large government grant that only it and a dummy corporation was qualified to apply for. Blunt conceived of the arrangement and pitched it [to the Agency]. As far as Blunt's official title, he was listed as a senior analyst. He had a secretary named Linda who didn't do much more than play solitaire and fetch him coffee in the mornings. She barely looked at his schedule, which contained little more than daily lunch appointments with various people. Also underneath Blunt's command were junior analysts named Brady Hawk and Alex Duncan."

If you want non-stop action and derring-dos to keep you on the edge of your seat, the Brady Hawk stories are for you. Non-stop is the word because once a mission starts, and it starts with the first page, you are not given a chance to catch your breath until the last page. And since there are now nine (as of this writing) adventures, that can and does mean a lot of late nights keeping up with what trouble Hawk is into.

The author, Jack Patterson, is a highly gifted writer who knows how to form a sentence to not bog down any action. He has several terrific series under his name but the most exciting, to me, are the Brady Hawk tales and I hope Hawk sticks around for a long time.