On Scope

Spain is teetering on financial collapse, and an alliance of Islamic investors is offering terms that come with a specific geopolitical agenda — the long game toward rolling back centuries of Spanish and European identity. When terrorists massacre a Marine security team at the Barcelona consulate, Kyle Swanson and his partner Beth Ledford are assigned to work backward from the killers to the financiers who authorized them. The seventh Swanson novel is structurally ambitious, running a European political thriller and a domestic terrorism thread simultaneously.

Luke Daniels narrates with the command of both the tactical and the political dimensions that the Swanson series requires — the financier-level antagonists need as much credibility as the operational threats, and Daniels handles the boardroom scenes with the same authority as the sniper sequences. At just over 10 hours, On Scope is a well-constructed entry in a series that has always treated the full spectrum of violence — from bullet to balance sheet — as its proper subject.