Pursuit of Honor
Vince Flynn, 2009
Simon & Schuster
448 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781416595175
Summary
The action begins six days after a series of explosions devastated Washington, D.C., targeting the National Counterterrorism Center and killing 185 people, including public officials and CIA employees. It was a bizarre act of extreme violence that called for extreme measures on the part of elite counterterrorism operative Mitch Rapp and his trusted team member, Mike Nash.
Now that the initial shock of the catastrophe is over, key Washington officials are up in arms over whether to make friends or foes of the agents who stepped between the enemy's bullets and countless American lives regardless of the legal consequences. Not for the first time, Rapp finds himself in the frustrating position of having to illustrate the realities of national security to politicians whose view from the sidelines is inevitably obstructed.
Meanwhile, three of the al Qaeda terrorists are still at large, and Rapp has been unofficially ordered to find them by any means necessary. No one knows the personal, physical, and emotional sacrifices required of the job better than Rapp. When he sees Nash cracking under the pressure of the mission and the memories of the horrors he witnessed during the terrorist attack, he makes a call he hopes will save his friend, assuage the naysayers on Capitol Hill, and get him one step closer to the enemy before it's too late. Once again, Rapp proves himself to be a hero unafraid "to walk the fine line between the moral high ground and violence" (the Salt Lake Tribune) for our country's safety, for the sake of freedom, for the pursuit of honor. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—1966
• Where—St. Paul, Minnesota, USA
• Education—University of St. Thomas
• Currently—lives in Minneapolis/St, Paul, Minnesota
The fifth of seven children, Vince Flynn was born in St. Paul, Minnesota, in 1966. He graduated from the St. Thomas Academy in 1984, and the University of St. Thomas with a degree in economics in 1988. After college he went to work for Kraft General Foods where he was an account and sales marketing specialist. In 1990 he left Kraft to accept an aviation candidate slot with the United States Marine Corps. One week before leaving for Officers Candidate School, he was medically disqualified from the Marine Aviation Program, due to several concussions and convulsive seizures he suffered growing up. While trying to obtain a medical waiver for his condition, he started thinking about writing a book. This was a very unusual choice for Flynn since he had been diagnosed with dyslexia in grade school and had struggled with reading and writing all his life.
Having been stymied by the Marine Corps, Flynn returned to the nine-to-five grind and took a job with United Properties, a commercial real estate company in the Twin Cities. During his spare time he worked on an idea he had for a book. After two years with United Properties he decided to take a big gamble. He quit his job, moved to Colorado, and began working full time on what would eventually become Term Limits. Like many struggling artists before him, he bartended at night and wrote during the day. Five years and more than sixty rejection letters later he took the unusual step of self-publishing his first novel. The book went to number one in the Twin Cities, and within a week had a new agent and two-book deal with Pocket Books, a Simon & Schuster imprint.
Term Limits hit the New York Times bestseller list in paperback and started a trend for all of Flynn's novels. Since then, his books have become perennial bestsellers in both paperback and hardcover, and he has become known for his research and prescient warnings about the rise of Islamic Radical Fundamentalism and terrorism. Read by current and former presidents, foreign heads of state, and intelligence professionals around the world, Flynn's novels are taken so seriously one high-ranking CIA official told his people, “I want you to read Flynn's books and start thinking about how we can more effectively wage this war on terror.”
October 2007 marked another milestone in Flynn’s career when his ninth political thriller, Protect and Defend, became a #1 New York Times bestseller. A few months later, CBS Films optioned the rights for Flynn’s Mitch Rapp character with the intention of creating a character-based, action-thriller movie franchise. Lorenzo di Bonaventura, who previously launched the "Harry Potter" and "Matrix" films as head of production at Warner Bros., and Nick Wechsler (We Own the Night, Reservation Road) will produce the films.
Extreme Measures, was published in 2008. It too was also a #1 New York Times bestseller. His next novel, Pursuit of Honor, was published in October 2009.
Flynn lives in the Twin Cities with his wife and three children.
Works by Flynn include Transfer of Power, The Third Option, Separation of Power , Executive Power , Memorial Day, Consent to Kill, Act of Treason, Extreme Measures, and Pursuit of Honor.
Influences: Ernest Hemingway, Robert Ludlum, Tom Clancy, J.R.R. Tolkien, Gore Vidal, and John Irving. (From the author's website.)
Book Reviews
Fists, feet, his 9 mm Glock, and a well-wielded epipen are Rapp's weapons of choice in Pursuit of Honor, Vince Flynn's latest thriller featuring the elite counterterrorism operative. It's a page-turner about an out-of-control terrorist shooting spree and the web of traitors in his own ranks that Rapp must untangle to put an end to the killings.
Sunday Oregonian
Mitch Rapp is a man's man and the definitive take-no-guff, lethal action hero, and anyone who reads Vince Flynn's spy novels knows it.... Just as in other Rapp books, the story moves well, the dialogue is snappy (but, as usual, not insulting or too cliched), and Rapp does things normal people only dream about. He's still the best CIA-trained human weapon this side of Jason Bourne.
Contra Costa Times (California)
Flynn demonstrates that he truly understands the psyche of the enemy.... Really scary.
Bookreporter.com
Discussion Questions
Use our LitLovers Book Club Resources; they can help with discussions for any book:
• How to Discuss a Book (helpful discussion tips)
• Generic Discussion Questions—Fiction and Nonfiction
• Read-Think-Talk (a guided reading chart)
Also consider these LitLovers talking points to help get a discussion started for Pursuit of Honor:
1. Start at the beginning...which in this case is Extreme Measures, the back story to Pursuit of Honor. Have you read the first book? If so, does Vince Flynn do a good job of picking up where that story left off? Is it necessary to read Extreme Measures in order to understand Pursuit?
2. Pursuit of Honor is particularly relevant to the current national debate on interrogation methods. What parallels do you see in Flynn's book with politics in Washington, D.C., regarding tracking down and interrogating terrorists?
3. How does Mitch Rapp view terrorists and the threat they pose to the U.S.? Would you describe his views as complicated...or straightforward? In the pursuit of security, what kind of hero does this country need? Is Rapp that hero?
4. How does Rapp deal with the challenges against him from his own countrymen—Glen Adams and the Congressional oversight committee? Did you appreciate the way in which Rapp spoke out at the hearing? Where does Irene Kennedy fit into all of this?
5. Talk about Rapp and Mike Nash's relationship in this book (and in the previous one, if you've read it). How do events in the storyline affect their friendship/mentorship? What kind of character is Nash?
6. Was this story predictable (as some feel), or were you completely surprised (as others were) by the plot twists?
7. Does Pursuit of Honor deliver in terms of its genre as a political thriller: fast-paced, blood-pounding excitement, unexpected plot twists, heroic action? Or did it fall short of your expectations? Will you read other Vince Flynn books?
(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)
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