CAL SHEPARD

Cal Shepard is an agent with the CIA.

He has been with that government agency for the past 16 years having been recruited straight out of college, which would make him at or around 38 years old.

He works for a fellow named Patterson and is considered by that man to be his very best agent. "Known only to a handful of peo9ple at Langley, Shepard was one of a small group of operators from the Special Activities Division who comprised an elite search-and-destroy (SD) unit with the sole forucs of hunting down other assassins". The training that the SD teams received was incredible with "a heavy emphasis on fieldcraft and advanced urban sniping and concealment to create the ultimate self-reliant hunter of men. In its first year in operations abroad, Shepard's SD unit racked up more confirmed kills than all of the other clandestine units combined within that same region".

When we first meet him, he has been temporarily reassigned to the position of liaison with a private tech company founded and run by a computer genius named Burke who was developing "a new threat-detection software called Perseus" and the relationship was a very close one "with Burke providing insights into the technological side of things that Shepard had been relying on for years overseas while the weathered field agent gave a glimpse into the methodologies of a master assassin-hunter".

In addition to the need for such a liaison, Patterson chose Shepard to be that man because Patterson recognized the signs of an agent who was headed into "troublesome terrain" from too many missions and the physical and mental trauma that came with them. A very bad shoulder wound from a firefight in Algeria sealed the deal. Shepard did not put up any argument as that meant being home with his beloved Cassie.

That woman is his wife, the love of his life, and the soon to be mother of their unborn little girl. What happens to them will be the basis for even more of the determined agent that Shepard becomes.

The positive things this series offers are many.

The writing is crisp and clear and extremely fast moving with the author being able to describe people and environments beautifully in an impressively small amount of time, letting the story return to the action while still letting the reader understand and 'see' the scene and know the participants. 

The plots are well thought out and presented in orderly manners, though in the first adventure is an overused trope of high level government people being up to no good and attacking the people who might know the truth. The rest of the plots are not quite so predictable and they are interesting and fun to read.

The negative is that opening adventure combined with my pet peeve these days of using the slaying of a spouse complete with unborn child as motivation - that and nitwits at the top who seem to sit around deciding, "hey, you know that extremely dangerous operative we trained to the utmost to hunt down bad guys in all terrains including urban area like D.C.? Yeah, let's give him an incredibly strong reason to come after us. What could go wrong?"

I would have graded this series higher if not for that because the writing really is darned good!