The Last Agent - Robert Dugoni

After reading Robert Dugoni’s soon-to-be-released The Last Agent, I am more thankful than ever that a book with the rather strange title The Extraordinary Life of Sam Hell caught my eye almost exactly a year ago. When I picked up Sam Hell in May 2019, Robert Dugoni was a new-to-me author whose work I was completely unfamiliar with; by the time I finished the novel a few days later, he was someone I wanted to know a lot more about. Still unaware at that point that Dugoni was best known for the five-book David Sloan series and the then six-book Tracy Crosswhite series, I happened to stumble upon a new Dugoni book on display at my local library called The Eighth Sister a few weeks later.

 

Much to my surprise, The Eighth Sister was nothing like The Extraordinary Life of Sam Hell. Instead, I held a spy thriller in my hands that rivals the classics of the genre in complexity, character development, and sheer storytelling. Charles Jenkins, as a six-foot-five black man, is not your typical CIA spy, much less one who has much of a chance of blending into a Russian crowd. But that’s who he is, and that’s what he has to do if he is going to survive long enough to get back to his ex-spy wife and children. Jenkins only makes it out of Russia in The Eighth Sister at all because a heroic Russian agent sacrifices her own life to make his escape possible – or so he believes.

 

But what if it turns out that she’s not dead?

 

Now, in The Last Agent, Jenkins learns that Paulina Ponomayova may be suffering a fate worse than death – months-long interrogation in the notorious Lefortovo Prison at the hands of one of Russia’s most ruthless interrogators. Jenkins is not even sure if the woman he’s heard about really is Paulina, but he knows one thing: if it is her, he will not  leave her behind. Jenkins will do whatever it takes to rescue the woman who saved his life and allowed him to meet his new baby daughter. Without her sacrifice, that could never have happened.

 

So it’s back into Russia, where all Jenkins has to do this time is free Paulina from one of the most security-conscious political prisons in the whole country and get them both safely back to the U.S. Even James Bond in his prime might find this task a bit difficult, but it’s going to take a series of miracles for an unusually tall black man - a sixty-something-year-old one, at that - to pull off this one.

 

Bottom Line: The Last Agent picks up almost where The Eighth Sister ended. The two novels are so closely tied together, in fact, that the reader can’t help but be a little astounded that Jenkins would dare risk his life by returning to the country he so recently barely escaped with his life. That, of course, is exactly the point. Charles Jenkins is not the kind of man who could ever turn his back on someone who sacrificed her life to save his. If fate has given him the unexpected chance to even the scales, he is going to take that chance while he has it. Robert Dugoni has written another exceptional spy thriller, one that works well as a standalone, but is even better when read as the sequel it is. The Charles Jenkins series is proving to be a good one.

Review Copy provided by Publsher for Review Purposes