Usually, I avoid quoting from book jacket copy, but in the case of Mark Greaney’s Dead Eye (which is “A Gray Man Novel”), I need help.
Dead Eye’s hero is Court Gentry (a.k.a. the “near-mythical Gray Man”) an “Ex-CIA master assassin” who prides himself on his ability “to fly below the radar and exist in the shadows.” He has been the protagonist of three previous Gray Man novels by Greaney (unread by me), but in this one, he encounters “something he’s never had to face before”: Russell Whitlock (a.k.a. Dead Eye), “a graduate of the same ultra-secret Autonomous Asset Program that trained and once controlled Gentry”—in short, “a killer who is just like him.”
For reasons I don’t quite understand (in fairness, those reasons probably make up the plot of an earlier Gray Man novel), the CIA issued a kill-on-sight order against Gentry years earlier, and, since then, he has been an assassin for hire (though, of course, he only kills bad guys: he has a conscience, after all), and Whitlock “has been directed to terminate his fellow student of death.”
What the jacket copy doesn’t reveal (but I will) is that the novel also contains the Mossad and its key agent, Ruth Ettinger, who becomes involved when Whitlock decides to assassinate the Prime Minister of Israel, using Gentry as cover.
Gentry is an efficient—if uninteresting—central character. Whitlock, however, makes a greater impression. He takes gleeful pleasure in killing and, whenever stuck somewhere, passes the time by imagining how to murder everyone else present. Eventually, Whitlock plays all the sides against one another—but then, he’s the villain in an action/spy novel, so what else would he do?
As for the other characters, they mostly perform as expected. The U.S. spy handlers are cold and bureaucratic. The CIA agents tracking Gentry are military sorts. Ruth Ettinger is beautiful and tough (and the only female character in the book).
Mark Greaney is the co-author of books with Tom Clancy, and he has Clancy’s interest in (and ear for) the technical minutia and jargon of government ops. Greaney’s bio tells me that he has “traveled to more than fifteen countries and trained alongside military and law enforcement,” and not for a second do I doubt Greaney’s knowledge. No matter how ludicrous the novel’s action, the author is concerned with verisimilitude.
He’s less concerned with aesthetics, however. A blunt novel, Dead Eye lacks the wit and elegance of Ian Fleming, John Le Carré, or even Robert Ludlum. With no room for scenes of repose, Greaney’s narrative seems constructed out of attention-grabbing headlines on a 24-hours news network.
Obviously, this book means to entertain, which it mostly accomplishes, but only in the same way that Doritos fill you up when you’re hungry. Dead Eye is critic-proof. A reader who, for whatever reason, doesn’t want to engage completely with a text will buy and absorb Greaney’s novel. To crib a line from The Social Network, I gave this book part of my attention; I used the rest of my attention to reacquaint myself with the Tindersticks discography as I read. In other words, I’m not Greaney’s audience at all.
How can I review this book without sounding like a snob? Do I tell you that I’ve seen each James Bond movie numerous times? Do I confess to watching Brian De Palma’s Mission: Impossible every time I encounter it on TV? I’ve always found the rush of “mindless” action movies more engaging than the colorless prose of “mindless” action novels. When somebody makes a movie of Dead Eye, I’ll probably enjoy it. I’ll just as likely forget to see it, though.
For now, I can only return to the jacket copy—in this case, the blurb on the front: Dead Eye is “Bourne for the new millennium.”
We get the Bourne we deserve, I suppose, but somebody smarter than I will have to explain what Dead Eye reveals about us.
