I’ve been following, and enjoying, Blake Banner’s Harry Bauer series of action thrillers. The Silent Blade is the sixth in the series. It delivers all the action you could ask for, though it’s probably best not to think about it too much.

Harry Bauer is a covert operative for a shadowy private organization called Cobra. His particular passion is wiping out drug lords. In the last book he got rid of two at once, and now he’s on the run in Trinidad, cut off from his employers, trying to figure out a way to get back to New York without alerting either the law or the cartels.

Then he meets a beautiful woman who works for the CIA, who first helps him and then turns him over to her bosses for “enhanced interrogation.” They want to recruit him, they explain, but first they need to know who he’s been working for. He finally escapes from them and runs to the leader of a Colombian cartel, offering (he claims) to be their source inside the CIA when he goes to work for them. Here he meets another beautiful woman, and fireworks (of a couple kinds) follow.

The action is hot and heavy, the sex pretty much the same (though not too explicit). But I can’t resist noting that the plot doesn’t make a lot of sense. Harry has reached a stage where he seems to just jump into deadly situations without a plan for survival. Are we supposed to think he’s a master strategist, or does he just have a death wish? I have a suspicion we’re not supposed to think that far.

Good of its kind. Cautions for language, violence, and adult situations.