“Of course you are. You’re James Bond cleverly disguised as an inbred redneck.”

“Thanks, I love you too. Actually, in my experience, most rednecks I have met were very fine people with solid values. And the worst inbreds I’ve met were among the European aristocracies and the Boston Brahmins.”

Harry Bauer, hero of Blake Banner’s Cobra series, is an assassin working for a private security firm that contracts to the government (for deniability). He is deadly and efficient and ruthless, but he has a code – he only kills the worst of the worst.

So he’s surprised when, as Quantum Kill opens, his bosses call him out of a well-earned vacation, asking him to do a job entirely outside his wheelhouse. There’s a woman (they won’t tell him who) at a certain place in Canada. Harry is to pick her up and transport her to Washington DC by a certain date, by a devious route he can work out for himself.

When he finally meets the woman, she’s a puzzle. She’s attractive, but strangely distant and affectless. She makes no effort to make friends, but soon they have more to worry about than their relations, when hit teams locate them – they can’t figure out how – and Harry has to do what he does best to keep her alive. It gets more puzzling when he figures out that the hit teams are CIA.

As they take a roundabout route as far out of their way as the Azores, the barriers between them start to break down. But more is going on than Harry and his employers have been told, and in the end he will resolve the problem through doing what he does best, in a shocking but oddly satisfying climax.

I’ve read some of Blake Banner’s books outside the Cobra series, and I was disappointed in certain attitudes and plot elements, especially in religious matters. But in this series, I haven’t had that problem – such opinions as Harry Bauer expresses generally please me.

I’m torn a bit as to how strongly I should recommend this series to our readers. In terms of reading pleasure, it’s top notch. My interest never flagged from the first page to the last (and as I grow older, flagging interest is a problem I have increasingly as I read). But the violence is harsh and stark and uncompromising. I feel a certain amount of guilt for enjoying it so much.

But enjoy it I do.