Black
By Christopher Whitcomb

     The old adage says “Write what you know.”

    Christopher Whitcomb has taken that to heart.

    Whitcomb, a former member of the FBI’s elite Hostage Rescue Team, has taken his experience and inside information and used it to create a terrific debut thriller, Black.

    Special Agent Jeremy Waller, a new member of the Hostage Rescue team, finds himself embroiled in a maze of corruption and secrets that includes a U.S. Senator, a greedy corporate CEO and an executive who doubles as a CIA agent. As Waller attempts to acclimate himself to his new world, he must learn the ropes and figure out how to fit it while satisfying his own sense of right and wrong, something that proves more difficult than he ever expected.

    Waller’s character seems to be a thinly veiled version of Whitcomb himself. In 2002’s, Cold Zero: Inside the FBI Hostage Rescue Team, Whitcomb detailed his decision to make a career change and become an FBI agent, his FBI training and then his subsequent experiences and involvement at Ruby Ridge, Waco and Kosovo as a sniper on the Hostage Rescue Team. Waller shares many of the same characteristics that Whitcomb self-deprecatingly wrote about and comes off as a very believable and very likable hero.

     Whitcomb’s writing is smooth and he keeps the tension at a high level throughout the book. The cloak and dagger plot involving Washington politicians and wealthy businessmen attempting to hide their secrets has been done before and the author doesn’t do much to stretch the genre here, but Whitcomb’s carefully drawn characters and authentic voice more than make up for that minor shortcoming. In particular, the details involving the mechanics and operation of the Hostage Rescue Team are extremely compelling and make for some great entertaining and informative reading.

   Overall, Christopher Whitcomb’s Black is an intriguing and intelligent page-turner that should be recognized as one of the year’s better suspense debuts.