With A Vengeance

Marcus Wynne has been a paratrooper, diplomatic bodyguard, Federal Air Marshal, close combat instructor, emergency medical technician, freelance writer, training and security consultant, and a cook. He's traveled to more than 50 countries, many of them listed in Robert Young Pelton's best-selling book, The World's Most Dangerous Places. His exploits in government service include hunting North Korean Special Forces units in the Korean DMZ, coordinating the American Embassy evacuations in Haiti during the 1991 coup, and leading a counter-terrorist Federal Air Marshal unit during the Gulf War. In the course of his many adventures, he's fallen off the highest mountain in England and raced mountain bikes in the Italian Dolomites with the BMW Race Team.

For decades he has also one of the leading-edge trainers in the mental aspects of what we now call warrior science. As a counter-terrorism instructor he was invited to South Africa to train Nelson Mandela's bodyguards and he trained all the local police tactical units for high-risk protection operations during the Dayton Peace Accords. As a consultant on training and security issues for high risk professionals, his clients include the CIA, DOD, NASA, BMW's Professional Racing Team, the Federal Reserve Bank, and dozens of elite military and police units from all over the world.

Wynne regularly consults with a variety of media outlets, including the Travel Channel's "The World's Most Dangerous Places." He is in demand as a speaker on aviation safety and security, counter-terrorism, military matters and the psychology of high-stress operatives. He has made television appearances on Oprah, Primetime Thursday, Good Morning America, Fox Family and Friends, The Crier Report, and has given radio interviews for dozens of major radio stations.

In short, he has a been-there, done-that background. And he's a novelist; a really good novelist.

His latest is a Kindle book titled With A Vengeance. The hero is an Air Marshal who , in addition to his general all-round runnin' and gunnin' abilities, really, really likes knives and is really, really good at using them. One of the neatest things about reading Wynne's books is that he gets the technical tactical stuff right: the fight scenes are notable for their realism and realistic pace; the tactics are modern and correct; the inter-agency conflicts reflect real-life; the gear and hardware is right, and the training and skills of the characters are realistic. There are no silencers on revolvers in his books, or fight scenes that go on for 10 minutes, or high heel-clad bimbos executing high kicks. The characters' distaste for spineless administrators and whore-like reporters is a delicious pleasure. Even the characters' own perception of the violence they dish out and receive is technically correct.

Wynne is a master of surprise plots in which the bad guys wreak terror in completely realistic but un-thought-of ways; this book is no exception. At first I cringed at reading descriptions of ways that terrorists could bring down planes even with extremely tight security, or that bad guys could defeat well-trained SWAT teams (this was in his earlier book, No Other Option), until I realized that while I may not have thought too much about how these things may be possible, they weren't too hard to figure out by genuine bad guys dedicated to their cause. The basic premise of With A Vengeance is that good guys can sometimes go bad for what they perceive as noble reasons. Then it's left to the other good guys with their bearings still intact to bring them down. There are, of course, plot twists, and the way that Wynne interweaves the elements of his multi-faceted plot shows the hand of a master novelist.