Inside Seal Team Six: my life and missions with America's elite warriors

The latest in the SEAL Team Six series is another action-packed and timely adventure. The leader of the team, Thomas Crocker, is having personal problems, but it hasn't affected his skills or loyalty to his team. Scientist James Dawkins gives a talk at a conference and then disappears. His wife is frantic, but her pleas for help are ignored. Dawkins has been kidnapped by the North Koreans, who are demanding that he fine-tune that country's nuclear-weapons system. While he contemplates his options, Crocker stumbles upon a bizarre conspiracy involving men disguising themselves as Chinese diplomats. The action never lets up for a second, and the SEAL team continues to give military-thriller fans everything they want. Copyright 2014 Booklist Reviews.

Mann and Pezzullo's uneven seventh military thriller featuring SEAL Team Six leader Tom Crocker (after 2016's Hunt the Dragon) finds Crocker in Iraqi Kurdistan, where a call comes in from coalition command ordering his team to rescue the survivors of a French helicopter crash 50 miles inside the Syrian border. During the drive to the downed helicopter, Crocker and partner Akil chat about the complications of tribal and religious strife in the region; the action picks up when they get into a firefight with some ISIS soldiers. The mission brings the team within range of ISIS commander Abu Samir al-Sufi (aka the Viper), a learned man and a fierce warrior. When al-Sufi captures a 24-year-old American working for Doctors Without Borders, Dyana Hood, and threatens to behead her, Crocker goes to the rescue. The resulting battle is brutal and people die, not all of them bad guys. The epic battle scenes compensate only in part for the extended history lectures and the forays into the team members' lives back home. Agent: Eric Lupfer, Fletcher & Co. (May)

In Mann and Pezzullo's intermittently exciting sixth SEAL Team Six thriller (after 2015's Hunt the Fox), Chief Warrant Officer Thomas Michael Crocker sets out to rescue James Ryan Dawkins, an aerospace engineer kidnapped and forced to develop a North Korean long-range ICBM capable of striking the United States. Crocker must also track a source of near-perfect counterfeit U.S. currency. Insider jargon and an alphabet soup of SIGs, AKs, NVGs, and SDVs bring the military aspects ably to life, but off-mission scenes ring flat. The authors highlight the brutality of the North Korean government, though the titular villain, "Honored General" Chou Jang Hee, is barely a presence. Crocker's globe-trotting investigation of state-sponsored counterfeiting feels like make-work before the final mission unfolds. It's only when the rescue goes wrong, as rescues will, and Crocker and his surviving team must avoid dangerous North Korean forces as they make their way toward the border that the novel becomes consistently gripping. Agent: Heather Mitchell, Gelfman Schneider Literary. (May)