Vince Flynn: Memorial Day

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As last weekend was Memorial Day in the US I thought it would be interesting to revisit one of Vince Flynn's best Mitch Rapp books which was released in 2004. There have been many books written about clones of Mitch Rapp but none of them are as good as the original and IMHO most of Flynn's earlier books were better than the later ones.

Memorial Day is the ultimate anti-terrorist thriller when Rapp and his military help raid a terrorist hideout in a remote part of Pakistan and uncover details of multiple freighters heading to US ports, any of which could be carrying a nuclear bomb. Intelligence gathered by the raid points to a catastrophic attack on Washington DC on Memorial Day when the US President will unveil a new memorial in the presence of world leaders, including from the UK and Russia.

This is classic Mitch Rapp cutting through the strictures and politics of the bureaucracy and doing it his way to avoid catastrophic results. The scenes where Rapp tells some of the most powerful and influential people in the world that they are wrong, including the President, are worth the price of the book alone. Vince Flynn knows how to build up the tension and focus on how Rapp can deliver the answer when others can't.

This book is still a great read and comes from a time when the fight against al-Qaeda was at its height and mega-terrorism was the greatest fear. I wonder how Flynn's forthcoming Mitch Rapp book "The Survivor" will adapt to the recent changes in world terrorism after the death of Osama bin Laden and the rise of unorganised home-grown terrorism, especially in the US and UK, with the Boston bombing and the hacking to death of an off-duty soldier in the streets of London.