When listeners first meet the three rough CIA Black Ops agents at the heart of this novel, they’re on an unlisted mission to the Liman Abu Zaabal prison, a special rendition site in Egypt, north of Cairo, “the perfect environment for creativity in torture”. The three operatives, Delta Force titan Washington, dangerous ex-Irish Republican Army drunk Finnen, and small-town Kansas boy (and the book’s narrator) Morgan, have been dispatched to Liman Abu Zaabal in a kind of response to their having gone off-script in an earlier undertaking. During that adventure, they killed a degenerate villain they’d only been assigned to contact (“We had been found guilty of having consciences,” as Morgan puts it).

At the prison, they’re to meet torture master Ashraf Azziz and take charge of the interrogation of Nasir Kabir, who’s been rumored to have led “the Al Qaeda infiltration of Basra” and looked “more like Antonio Banderas than Omar Sharif”. The three agents have a smooth, well-practiced professional relationship characterized by both obscene banter and sincere respect for each other’s lethal capabilities, while they bond over Jameson and beer. But what they find at Abu Zaabal shocks even their jaded sensibilities (“It was as if light had vanished from the earth and humanity had been replaced by something from a black dimension”).

The hard-edged book’s plot hits the ground running and immediately increases its momentum by having the three friends summarily kill both Kabir and Azziz in disgust and successfully make their escape before local authorities can apprehend them. The trio boards a jet to Yemen to facilitate a swap of high-value detainees, meeting a tough-as-nails operative there named Smith, whose beauty matches her competence in the field. Lealos also wrote Don’t Mean Nuthin’, a military thriller set in Vietnam during that incursion.