DANIEL PETROVICH

Daniel Petrovich is an agent with the Black Flag Program.

He was and will be. When we first meet him, he had quit the organization, a special operations of the Department of Defense run by a gung-ho, and possibly not so stable, General Terrence Sanderson. It was Sanderson who conceived of the need for extremely well trained operatives taken from any branch of the military and honed to be the best killing machines possible. These ultra-sharp knives would not be used in normal combat but in the blackest of ops when the need to get it, dispatch (kill) a target, and get out again was called for.

Petrovich was one of the small number of agents working for the General and he was, the General had to grudgingly admit, the very best that he had and the best he had ever seen. Still, in any mission things can go wrong no matter how good the tool and in a mission to Bosnia during the height of the troubles there in the mid to late 90s, Petrovich had seen just how bad things could become. Working alongside a female citizen of that land, a woman named Zorana Zekulic, he had nearly completed his assignment when he was discovered and both of them endured horrendous torture. Unfortunately for those doing the torture, they did not know just how good both Petrovich and Zekulic really were. The pair survived. The torturers did not.

As the first recorded adventure begins, Petrovich was out of the business and using the MBA he had earned to work in the financial field, happily married to the Jessica, a beautiful woman with just the slightest of accents. Then the General contacted him with a request for help 'one last time' and a bit of a veiled threat to reveal who Jessica really was. Reluctantly, Petrovich found himself pulled back into that old life and so did Jessica. The General had to wonder, though, which of the two was the more deadly.

First, this series is a cross of spy craft and military action with the Department of Defense and the Black Flag Program in it. When things turn to team operations, it is very much the latter and as such really does not belong in this compendium. Luckily, there are plenty of times when it is just the main character, Daniel Petrovich, doing his specialty or even better, his wife. Then it falls back into the spy biz, or at least the government assassin biz.

I really, really liked Petrovich and even more so his wife, Jessica. I say that because when the story is about them, it is a hoot to read and I would love more.

When it moves off either of those two, it gets really confusing to me. There are a ton of people doing a lot of things for all sorts of different reasons and keeping track proved a challenge that I failed. I found myself skimming the pages until one of the Petrovich's showed back up again. Mind you, some of the support characters are very interesting and a couple worthy of their own series but there were just too many of them.

But I did like the Petrovich couple. A bunch.