Book review: Conspiracy theory and Wagner group spice up latest Jack Carr thriller

Only the Dead

By Jack Carr
Fiction/Simon & Schuster/Paperback/564 pages/$18.62/Amazon (

amzn.to/43EPW3a

)/3 stars 

The idea of a state-trained elite soldier with a licence to kill is a well-worn trope in a thriving sub-genre of testosterone-driven, action-thriller fiction. So Jack Carr’s James Reece can claim a straight line of descent from Ian Fleming’s James Bond through Robert Ludlum’s Jason Bourne to Mark Greaney’s Court Gentry. 

Like all these predecessors that have been adapted for film, Reece has been picked up for Prime Video’s The Terminal List (2022 to present; the first of the Reece book series), with Chris Pratt in the lead.

As the genre has evolved, so, too, has the violence quotient been upped and, more intriguingly, the political subtext cranked to a distinctly conservative timbre. 

Fans of this series will know that Carr does not flinch from detailed descriptions of violence. Over the past five books, Reece has carved a bloody swathe through countless nameless henchmen and assorted corrupt politicians. This latest book is no different, with a particularly bloody episode in a health club as well as a Gulag torture throwback. 

In this sixth instalment of the series, the key villains include the Russians. And in a surprisingly prescient reference, the Wagner paramilitary group which caught the world’s attention just in June in the real world plays a pivotal role here. 

Only The Dead, like all the other books in the series, picks up where the previous story left off. Reece, framed for the assassination of the United States president, is tossed into a maximum-security facility while friends and foes alike scramble to regroup and/or strategise. 

Having maxed out the vengeance storylines to do with Reece’s murdered family and fellow soldiers, Carr harks back to Reece’s father – Thomas – for the rude plot mechanics. 

An operative in the Central Intelligence Agency, Thomas, it seems, spent his career piecing together evidence of a secretive cabal called the Collective, born at the height of Cold War paranoia. 

As it turns out – conspiracy theory alert – the Collective is planning to upturn the geopolitical order by detonating a dirty nuke built with Iranian plutonium off the coast of Israel, thereby sparking a war between the two age-old enemies. Minor educational detour – readers learn that the way to disarm a dirty nuke is to set off another explosion.

But the prime motive of the Collective is not so much ideology as it is money, the trading of ideological conviction for the worship of Mammon being the most despicable of all sins in this fictional world’s moral hierarchy. 

One of the pleasures of reading military action thrillers is the detailing of missions. The best writers in the genre can plot pulse-pounding action through the deft planning, execution, unexpected derailing and aftermath of military manoeuvres. Carr has proven in previous books that he can do this well, with the sort of lovingly detailed, technical descriptions of military hardware worthy of Janes. 

Unfortunately, the Collective, with its conspiracies dating to the Vietnam War (Rambo reference alert) and current financial derivatives scheming, demands a lot of explanation that will have impatient readers scratching their heads and/or speed-reading through chunky expositions. Action man Reece kicks into high gear only on page 175, which is a lot to demand of adrenaline junkies. 

Carr’s writing style affects the kind of macho sentimentality rooted in failing the Bechdel test. The women in his books exist only to die, so Reece can display “emotional attachment”. This sort of gender stereotyping is to be expected from the genre, but Only The Dead offers a particularly egregious exemplar in the form of a female character whose sole function is, literally, as a last-gasp lifeline for Reece. His romance with hotshot journalist Katie is also toe-curlingly cheesy. 

But there are redeeming factors to Carr’s storytelling, chief of which are the insights he offers into the conservative, hawkish mindset. 

As a former Navy Seal with combat experience, Carr is a product of the military-industrial complex. So his critique of the American military comes from hard-won knowledge on the ground, and his scepticism has real ballast. 

The Reece series is intriguing as much for its indictment of American politicians, both on the left and the right, as it is for its celebration of a type of heroic masculinity that would be branded toxic in current nomenclature. But there is no denying the earnestness in Carr’s championing of the honour and courage of men who serve in the armed forces. 

Despite his clunky ineptitude when writing women, he has a sound grasp of action writing and a surprisingly wide reading list which quotes everything from John Keats to Rudyard Kipling. Nonetheless, having run out of dead family and friends to exploit for vengeful rampages, it might seem that the Reece books have hit a natural ending with this episode. May it rest in peace. 

If you like this, read: Alistair MacLean’s The Guns Of Navarone (HarperCollins, 1957, 416 pages, $18.47, Amazon, go to

amzn.to/43y7nm4

). No one does lean, muscular action thrillers like the granddaddy of them all, MacLean. This classic World War II thriller follows a small band of misfit Allied saboteurs on a mission to take out the deadly guns of an impregnable Nazi fortress.