Book Review – Vince Flynn’s “Protect and Defend”
Last week I finished reading Vince Flynn‘s novel, Protect and Defend.
Protect and Defend is a modern day story taking place mainly in Iran and Iraq. The story starts with a daring Israeli covert ops mission that levels a secret Iranian nuclear reactor. The attack is from within the building and basically collapses the structure on top of itself, completely destroying the secret nuclear reactor program.
As expected, the Iranian government comes out blaming the U.S. government for destroying the structure, and threatens the United States in its usual manner. Sensing potential terrorist strikes in the U.S., the United States president enlists Mitch Rapp to essentially go overseas and target the terrorists, bringing the fight to them and eliminating the bad guys before they could strike Western targets.
Rapp ultimately heads to Mosul, Iraq to meet with a contact, while Azad Ashani, the head of Iran’s Ministry of Intelligence and Security, is also en-route to Mosul to meet with CIA Director Irene Kennedy. The plan for Ashani and Kennedy is to meet and hopefully diffuse the escalating tensions between Iran and the United States before open war is declared.
CIA Director Kennedy and the head of the Iranian Ministry of Intelligence and Security meet in secrecy in Mosul. An agreement is reached, but as Kennedy is departing, an elaborate attack is launched on her motorcade by Lebanese terrorist, Imad Mukhtar, ending in her kidnapping. Mitch Rapp tries to save the Director of the CIA, but his efforts come too late and he’s only able to kill about a dozen or so terrorists in the rescue attempt.
Rapp is in a race against time as he takes three prisoners to an interrogation camp and tries to get them to talk. His methods can be viewed as rather gay at times and were heavily criticized by top ranking U.S. officials, but apparently it works and he’s able to get some real information about Mukhtar and likely hiding spots in the city. Rapp and the local forces determine where Kennedy is being held, and another rescue attempt is made to save his boss.
All while this is happening, an Iranian submarine sinks an Iranian warship in an attempt to frame the U.S. Navy and provoke them into a shooting war. Of course this fails as a U.S. submarine has audio tracks proving that it was the Iranians who sunk their own ship. The issue is quickly dropped and that’s the last we hear of the Iranian military, which itself was barely mentioned in the story.
The main part of the story ends with the rescue of CIA Director Kennedy by Mitch Rapp. The assault is finished fairly quickly and Kennedy is rescued before giving up sensitive information about the CIA and agents throughout the region. In the very end of the story, Rapp is sent to kill Mukhtar who is captured and sitting in a jail cell in Tripoli, Lebanon.
After reading this short novel, I had to ask myself, “Was this written for adults or children?”
This was my first time reading a novel by Vince Flynn. I’ve heard of the author but hadn’t been inspired to check out any of his work. I came across this book at a garage sale and decided to give it a shot. And after reading this piece of crap, I can easily say that I won’t waste my time with any more of Flynn’s work.
For starters, pretty much all of the dialog in the book felt childish and stupid. I know that it takes a certain skill to create realistic dialog, especially in an adult novel, and Flynn clearly lacks that ability. Perhaps in future works he’d be best hiring out that job and having something a little more realistic.
The Mitch Rapp character has a serious attitude problem and apparently feels cool insulting people with cheesy catch phrases and one-liners that make one nearly want to barf. I get it that he’s a rogue warrior and tries to be a walking killing machine, but come on! It clearly felt like Vince Flynn’s Mitch Rapp was a cheap ripoff of Clive Cussler’s heroic adventurer, Dirk Pitt. This was one of the few books where I was seriously hoping that the main character would die a horrible, painful death.
Don’t even get me started about the stupidity of the Iranian leaders in the book. I pay attention to news from the Middle East on a regular basis, and if the real life characters were this stupid then the nation of Iran would be the laughing stock of that region. Saddam would have easily conquered them during the Iran-Iraq War of the early 1980s.
The main plot of the story felt uneven and ultimately incomplete.
The book started with an interesting destruction of a secret Iranian nuclear power plant. That was different, but then it shifted to a mediocre “Let’s find some terrorists but also stop Iran from acting like a warmonger.” The epic conclusion came not from nearly a war between the U.S. and Iran (neither military is really mentioned anyway *sigh*), but rather a rescue mission of CIA Director Kennedy.
So, ummm, what about Israel? The country was barely talked about in the first part of the book. After that, well, nothing. The Iranians suspected them of being part of the attack on the plant, but I guess the almighty leaders found the superpower of the United States as an easier target. In real life I’m pretty sure that Iran would have gone after both the United States and Israel, especially since Iran has threatened to erase Israel from the map on several occasions now.
What about the U.S. navy operating in the region? Apart from having a single submarine keeping track (and losing) of an Iranian sub, it felt like the rest of the U.S. navy was just on a pleasure cruise. Pretty much nothing was written about any aircraft carriers or U.S. aircraft keeping tabs on the Iranian military. Had we not known about the Iranian sub sinking an Iranian warship in attempted blackmail, we wouldn’t have known that there were any tensions between the two countries.
After the rescue of CIA Director Kennedy, did Iran all of a sudden decide to call off the warmongering and just forget that they tried to pick a fight with the U.S.? Azad Ashani ultimately met with CIA Director Kennedy in Washington, D.C. to try to repair relations, but it seems quite unlikely that both countries would essentially just drop anything without so much as any words in front of televised audiences or the United Nations. Stories like this normally finish with the elimination of enemy leaders or a brief military conflict, not so much with the predictable rescue of a female CIA director.
Oh, how thrilling! /s
Rapp’s rescue of Kennedy was too predictable, and those last few pages of him killing Mukhtar were unnecessary. Vince Flynn had another novel on his hands by writing about Rapp’s pursuit of Mukhtar throughout the Middle East. It could have been both fun and exciting. Or, even better, Flynn could have actually extended this incomplete novel and just had the pursuit here in Protect and Defend.
But he didn’t and here’s a novel that’s bound to excite middle school students or those just looking for a really simple and predictable so-called political thriller.
Was Protect and Defend political? A little bit in some parts.
Was it thrilling? Certainly not.
Is it a waste of time? Without a doubt.
