Shakedown: A Novel

by Newt Gingrich, Pete Earley

Overview

Mayberry and Garrett, introduced in the national bestseller Collusion, are caught in the middle of a deadly crisis with a pending nuclear bomb attack and little help from the government that sidelined them both.

When an exiled Iranian scientist is assassinated in Washington, DC, the former FBI counterintelligence agent and ex-SEAL are pulled back into the world of clandestine ops—and the fate of the entire East Coast is at stake. Joining ranks with a heralded Mossad agent, Mayberry and Garrett pursue a skilled international killer hired to murder a legendary Israeli spymaster. 

Their pursuit draws them into an international conspiracy led by a power-hungry Russian oligarch intent on destroying Washington, DC, and the Navy’s most important Atlantic base. The oligarch plots to unleash a nuclear onslaught first devised by the KGB but shelved by Kremlin leaders during the Cold War. On top of this, Iran’s sudden offer to help the United States raises suspicions about its possible role in a global shakedown. 

With too many enemies emerging and too little time, the two Americans are forced to operate outside official channels to stay ahead of naive US politicians and foreign enemies out to entangle their efforts in red tape. Operating in an international tinderbox, Mayberry and Garrett must decipher which players are allies and which are posers—in time to thwart a cataclysmic nuclear attack on US soil and prevent an international incident that could ignite a third world war. And they must keep themselves alive.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780062860194
Publisher:	HarperCollins
Publication date:	03/24/2020
Series:	Mayberry and Garrett Series , #2
Pages:	368
Product dimensions:	5.60(w) x 8.90(h) x 1.50(d)

About the Author

Newt Gingrich is a former Speaker of the House, a Fox News contributor, and a New York Times bestselling author. He is the author of thirty-seven books, including the recent New York Times bestseller Trump vs. China. Listen to Newt's podcast Newt's World at www.newtsworld.com or anywhere you get your podcasts.

Pete Earley is a former Washington Post reporter, a Pulitzer Prize finalist, and the New York Times bestselling author of sixteen books. He lives in northern Virginia.   

Editorial Reviews

03/23/2020

In bestsellers Gingrich and Earley’s unoriginal sequel to 2019’s Collusion, former Navy SEAL Brett Garrett and sidekick Valerie Mayberry, who has recently been fired from the FBI, are surprised to learn that a Middle Eastern terrorist they thought the Israelis killed is not only alive but has just murdered Brett’s neighbor, a dissident Iranian nuclear physicist, in Washington, D.C. Meanwhile, a Russian oligarch has purchased a used Russian submarine and an Iranian nuclear device that he intends to deploy against the U.S. For help dealing with the terrorist and the oligarch, Brett turns to his pal Thomas Jefferson Kim, the head of Intel-Eye-Check, a cybersecurity firm, who handles the usual computer wizardry. On the personal side, Brett and Valerie spend a lot of time trading insults to hide their burgeoning attraction. Plenty of action and solid prose, along with plenty of intriguing little-known historical and technical facts, make up in part for such stock elements as an unscrupulous Washington reporter and a high-level government traitor. Political thriller fans who have no problem with knowing what’s going to happen next will be satisfied. Agents: Kathy G. Lubbers, Lubbers Agency and David Vigliano, AGI Vigliano Literary. (Mar.)

Publishers Weekly

Plenty of action and solid prose, along with plenty of intriguing little-known historical and technical facts.” — Publishers Weekly

“An action thriller, with a full share of bang-up scenes.” — Kirkus Reviews

From the Publisher

2020-03-02
Ex–Navy SEAL Brett Garrett and ex–FBI agent Valerie Mayberry, each disgraced in their respective field, go outside of official channels to avert a devastating threat to the United States.

The murder of an Iranian scientist who lived in a condo down the hall from Garrett primes the plot of this geopolitical thriller, which involves a criminally connected Russian oil billionaire; an evil Iranian general who was "conceived in a brutal rape"; a Palestinian father-daughter assassination team out to avenge the killing of the rest of their family in an Israeli bombing; and an Islamic terrorist recruited by Iran to detonate a nuclear device on a "ghost" submarine off the coast of Virginia. Back from Gingrich and Earley's Collusion (2019), Brett and Valerie are quite the duo. He is an opioid-addicted Afghanistan and black ops veteran whose torture/murder of Russian general Andre Gromyko (Gingrich's backhanded salute to the late, real-life Soviet foreign minister?) led to his ouster from the SEALs. She is an obsessive, oxycodone-popping beauty (her partner thinks she resembles Keri Russell of TV's The Americans, but she acts more like Claire Danes on Homeland) who has to cope with permanent nerve damage from a gas attack on the U.S. Senate. Though the authors are happy to install a naïve president with the name Randle Fitzgerald, their political commentary is largely restrained—Fitzgerald's party affiliation is not revealed. This is, at its best, an action thriller, with a full share of bang-up scenes (and at least one torture too many). And though former House Speaker Gingrich and Earley have a nagging tendency to have characters verbalize plot details (as in "Remind me, Petrov, how many fights did you win before we were released?" and "You mean, before your father bribed three judges to erase our crimes?"), they keep the story afloat.

An entertaining, if coldhearted, international thriller.

Kirkus Reviews