A number of years ago I stumbled across a book that featured an orphan trained as an assassin who had turned his special set of skills toward helping others, often by “removing” the people who were creating problems for them. That was hardly the first thriller of its type, and many others have been published since.
Recently, Wolf Six came to me for a blog tour, and I made the mistake of starting it in the evening. I finished it that same night. Wolf Six is the name by which Ruslan Akulov is known. He is an assassin for hire, but is very picky about the assignments he takes. His code does not let him hurt bystanders, nor children. As a former member of the Russian Spetznatz, he was trained in weapons, hand-to-hand combat, infiltration, and many other things that let him get in and take someone out. Ideally, they also let him escape. So far, so good.
After spending some time in Chicago and completing an assignment, he has decided it was time to leave the area. He had stored money and fake passports in a safety deposit box at a Chicago bank, and had come to pick them up.
In the kind of coincidence that tends to happen in thrillers and action movies, some Russian gangsters, Bratva, picked that same time to rob the bank. Not wanting to be killed, captured, arrested, or have his money stolen, Ruslan takes a gun from one of the robbers and kills almost all of them before the police arrive. He then makes his escape in the confusion of the hostages leaving the building.
Unfortunately for him, his face was captured by a security camera, and he is recognized by both one of the gangsters and by the FBI agent they were working with. Not knowing this, he takes on another assignment, this one personal. Many years before he had been tricked into killing an innocent priest. Since then, he had hoped to take out the man who tricked him. A recently widowed woman reaches out to his handler asking him to kill that same man, who had tortured and murdered her husband.
In cascading fashion, the separate plots twist and combine, then twist again and separate. The Bratva, the FBI, and the CIA all want to capture and either keep or kill Wolf Six. His handler is kidnapped and held by the Bratva in hopes of forcing him into their hands. Ruslan travels from the US to Ukraine, then through several other countries before flying to Cuba. Along the way he recruits help from a former brother in arms from Spetznatz, from various people with other skills and morality for purchase, and receives help from a very unexpected source at the very end.
I won’t pretend this is going to change the future of the international thriller. Although I enjoyed it very much, it is very much part of a select genre. I just really, really like that genre.
Wolf Six is not groundbreaking. It doesn’t need to be. It is a fast paced, fun read, capable of being read in one sitting (though don’t start it after dark if you intend to do that). Some of the seams show where the plot was stitched together, but sometimes those are the most delightful comfort reads.