Praise for "The Ghost War":

The News & Observer

I was about 100 pages into Alex Berenson's mesmerizing new spy thriller, "The Ghost War," one midnight dreary recently when the familiar National Weather Service "BWAAA! BWAAA! BWAAA!" started exploding incessantly from a nearby radio, warning of imminent severe thunderstorms, possible tornadoes and the dreaded "straight-line winds."

As vicious gusts shook the house, lights flickered and raindrops pounded the roof, I did not move away from windows, nor did I move immediately to the most enclosed interior room of the house. I kept turning pages. And because I am a board-certified severe weather hypochondriac, I consider any book that keeps me reading through both meteorological hell and literal high water an extraordinary achievement...

"The Ghost War" (may) sound like classed-up Ludlum or dumbed- down Le Carre. It is neither. Hero Wells is no Bourne-again stereotype of a secret agent man, but a complex blend of smarts, scars, cynicism and wile. And the book's imaginings of, say, what goes on in the innermost sanctums of Tiananmen Square or the proud but demoralized corridors of CIA headquarters seem not so much "ripped from today's headlines" as eerily destined to be set in type for tomorrow's.

The Globe and Mail

Readers often ask me about the good old-fashioned thriller. Now that Robert Ludlum is dead (although his publisher maintains the fiction that he's not), who's going to write the story with the stalwart hero, the grand weapons, the nasty cabal set to destroy the world? Fear not. Alex Berenson is back with the second novel featuring CIA agent John Wells, in a novel that offers a thrill a page and delivers a terrific
story...

While the story is complex, it is perfectly (and very scarily) plausible, a reminder that small wars in faraway places can get very big, very fast.

From The New York Times:

In "The Ghost War," the New York Times reporter Alex Berenson has fashioned a smart, economically written spy novel that imagines a future clash with the Chinese. As such, it's a novel for policy wonks, with a very sophisticated vision of how a conflict with China could come about, akin to the kind of war-gaming scenarios that occupy Washington strategists...

The plot moves quickly, in tight, essayistic paragraphs that show Berenson's command of such disparate worlds as the United States Navy and Chinese migrant workers. I once spent a month aboard a destroyer in the Pacific and can attest to the accuracy of the author's portrayal of one. His description of a semi-starving Chinese laborer who starts a riot, and whose only memory of home and his dead parents is a baseball hat that a policeman grabs from him, is vivid and moving...

(Berenson) displays a reporter's fine awareness of headlines over the horizon.

Kirkus Reviews:

John Wells, who saved America's bacon in Berenson's The Faithful Spy (2006), returns, incompletely recovered from his Times Square showdown with Islamic terrorists.

Tortured by the violence of his years as a double agent, Wells still craves action and excitement: He routinely rises from the bed he shares with comely intelligence agent Jennifer Exley for high-speed midnight rides on his huge motorcycle. Not to worry because real action is on the way. There's been a disaster off the coast of North Korea, where what was to have been the extraction of America's best intelligence source has gone completely wrong. All hands were lost when a bug planted on the rescued scientist put the rescue team squarely in the sights of a Korean submarine. How the scientist came to be bugged and why he was betrayed has everything to do with why Wells is recalled to service along with his lady friend. It is becoming clear that great international mischief is afoot, and Wells has the right combination of fluent Arabic and nearly superhuman strength to begin unraveling the anti-American plot, requiring the agent to fly to Afghanistan and join in a small deadly strike on hidden Taliban fighters. Numerous bodies bite the dust before Wells
snares the Taliban's Russian consultants. Russians? Indeed. They are part of the machinery set in motion by General Li Ping, the only man at the top of the Chinese Communist party who is not on the take. Li's plan to bring about fair distribution of the new national wealth involves not only those Russians, but a mole at the CIA whose treachery has blinded the agency at the worst possible time.

Terrific and relentless suspense and action in a reasonably credible plot.

Booklist:

Berenson, winner of the 2007 Edgar Award for his first novel, The Faithful Spy, proves his debut was not fluke with this stellar sequel. John Wells has recovered physically from the wounds he suffered in TheFaithful Spy, but the mental scars still linger. To get back in the game, he takes an assignment in Afghanistan to investigate recent Taliban activity. What he uncovers shocks him and will lead to a disastrous attempt to recover a CIA undercover agent in North Korea and to the discovery of a mole in the CIA who is feeding secrets to a ruthless general in the Chinese government, who is, in turn, using the mole’s intel to his own benefit. Wells is a fascinating, tortured soul, and his attempts to live a normal life create a gripping narrative. The authenticity Berenson brings to his ripped-from-the-headlines stories makes them seem as vividly real and scary as nonfiction or the nightly news.
— Jeff Ayers

Publishers Weekly:

"Having foiled an al-Qaeda plot targeting Times Square in 2006's The Faithful Spy (which won an Edgar Award for best first novel), maverick CIA agent John Wells confronts a very different threat in this pulse-pounding sequel from New York Times reporter Berenson. When the CIA's efforts to extract Dr. Sung Kwan, a North Korean scientist and an invaluable source on Kim Jong Il's nuclear ambitions, result in the
deaths of Kwan and the rescue team, Wells's significant other, Jennifer Exley, searches to identify the person in U.S. intelligence who compromised Kwan's security. Meanwhile, Wells returns to Afghanistan, the scene of much of the action in The Faithful Spy, to find out what outside country has been helping the Taliban reassert itself. While the mole hunt will be familiar to genre buffs and the characters and the perils they face aren't as nuanced as those in John le Carré or even David Ignatius, the author's plausible scenario distinguishes this from most spy thrillers."

Library Journal:

"Having enjoyed an illustrious debut with the 2007 Edgar Award-winning "The Faithful Spy," Berenson deploys CIA agent John Wells to defuse a cleverly triangulated scheme aimed at vaulting China to full status as a major world power. Ambitious General Li, hoping to aid hundreds of millions of struggling Chinese have-nots, launches plots in North Korea, England, and Afghanistan to consolidate his power in Beijing. Working with shards of evidence, Wells races to decode the plot just hours before the Li-choreographed war erupts. Especially effective as psychological studies of men under stress are the contrasting portrayals of CIA agent Wells, warts and all, with the CIA mole who shops the United States to General Li. Berenson marshals turncoats, the Taliban, and testosterone to produce a tautly paced, credible, and gripping scenario guaranteed to buttress Berenson's niche as one of the stars in the suspense firmament."

Kirkus Reviews:

"John Wells, who saved America's bacon in Berenson's "The Faithful Spy" (2006), returns, incompletely recovered from his Times Square showdown with Islamic terrorists.

"Tortured by the violence of his years as a double agent, Wells still craves action and excitement: He routinely rises from the bed he shares with comely intelligence agent Jennifer Exley for high-speed midnight rides on his huge motorcycle. Not to worry because real action is on the way. There's been a disaster off the coast of North Korea, where what was to have been the extraction of America's best intelligence source has gone completely wrong. All hands were lost when a bug planted on the rescued scientist put the rescue team squarely in the sights of a Korean submarine. How the scientist came to be bugged and why he was betrayed has everything to do with why Wells is recalled to service along with his lady friend. It is becoming clear that great international mischief is afoot, and Wells has the right combination of fluent Arabic and nearly superhuman strength to begin unraveling the anti-American plot, requiring the agent to fly to Afghanistan and join in a small deadly strike on hidden Taliban fighters. Numerous bodies bite the dust before Wells snares the Taliban's Russian consultants. Russians? Indeed. They are part of the machinery set in motion by General Li Ping, the only man at the top of the Chinese Communist party who is not on the take. Li's plan to bring about fair distribution of the new national wealth involves not only those Russians, but a mole at the CIA whose treachery has blinded the agency at the worst possible time.

"Terrific and relentless suspense and action in a reasonably credible plot."

.

Critics love "The Faithful Spy":

Booklist (starred review):
"Berenson works against the inherent sensationalism of his story with a diversity of viewpoints and deft character sketches that avoid oversimplifying the complex beliefs and strategies of his combatants... The plotting is superlative, baffling readers and characters alike as the mastermind behind al-Qaeda's sleeper network wages covert war against a vigilant and resourceful enemy. As with Thomas Harris' Black Sunday (1975) or Joseph Finder's Zero Hour (1996), one could hardly ask for a more skillful, timely, and well-rounded translation of our worst fears into satisfying thrills; a sure bet for fans of Jack Higgins and Vince Flynn."

The New York Times:
''Nam. Nam. Nam. Nam. Nam. Nam.'' The single syllable ricochets like a stray sharp rock through Alex Berenson's ''Faithful Spy,'' connecting fighters and bureaucrats, revolutionaries and black-marketeers, the peaceful and the violent. Though much of the action is conducted by misguided Americans in a hopelessly escalating war, we aren't in Indochina anymore. The word means yes in Arabic, and there is global terror afoot in the novel, with precious few equipped to keep annihilation from our own shores.

The kind of spy thriller Mr. Berenson has set out to deliver has to contend nowadays with a world's worth of violent events flashing from battlefield and bomb site to television or computer screen at the blink of a satellite signal. Where does that leave the war novel? The fiction of international intrigue?

For Mr. Berenson, a reporter for The New York Times who covered Iraq for three months in 2003, it goes beyond ripping his story from the headlines to imagining, and in some instances eerily predicting, scenarios tied to his central premise: that a Central Intelligence Agency operative infiltrated Al Qaeda several years before 9/11. John Wells, his man undercover, is making it his mission to help lasso the storm of
catastrophe, madness, secrets and betrayal that continue in its aftermath...

Mr. Berenson gives Wells -- or Jalal, as he's known in his jihadi incarnation-- a Muslim Lebanese grandmother to make his increasing belief in Islam credible, and a pretty C.I.A. handler, Jennifer Exley, who has also forfeited everything for an ungrateful agency, to doubt and love him simultaneously. When Wells gets wind of a plot against the United States far graver than the World Trade Center attacks, he has to expedite his return to the States to avert it. He comes down from his alien mountains and into post-9/11 American culture like Rip van Winkle in a turban...

Simply, everything and everyone have changed. Wells ''regretted not having been a spy during the cold war,'' Mr. Berenson writes at one point. ''Back then the game had possessed a certain formal elegance. Neither side really expected the other to blow up the world, and proxy soldiers in Africa and Central America fought the nastiest battles.''

Now his Americans step over every conceivable line drawn by the Constitution in scenes of torture and coercion, while their enemies delight in doing the innocent harm. A new language is spoken, couched in hypotheticals and unfamiliar signs, and a new math has had to be devised to calculate the outcome of hijackings, biological assaults and technological cruelty in the service of fundamentalist religion.

If Mr. Berenson remains as much reporter as novelist at this point -- a newspaper editor would tell him he had overstuffed his lead, and that he often tended to impart information that was all too well known -- he still has an ingenious narrative to show for it. Uncertain times call for tough examinations, and ''The Faithful Spy'' doesn't back away.

USA Today:
The author: Berenson, a New York Times reporter, used his experiences covering the Iraq war to write this unsettling first novel that imagines the life of fictional CIA agent John Wells, who infiltrates al-Qaeda.

The plot: Wells, known to his Muslim compatriots as Jalal, has been a part of the terrorist group for two years when 9/11 strikes. No longer trusted by his handlers in Washington and constantly having to prove himself to his al-Qaeda brothers, Wells is offered the ultimate test of loyalty when terrrorist mastermind Omar Khadri orders the agent to return to the USA and await a new assignment.

What's good: Dirty bombs and biological contamination riddle this novel with paranoia and the frightening realization that an attack on the USA, as it's laid out in The Faithful Spy, appears highly plausible, even inevitable.

The St. Louis Post-Dispatch:
Back in 2003, The New York Times dispatched reporter Alex Berenson to Iraq for a three-month stint with the Army. That experience planted the seed of "The Faithful Spy," Berenson's first novel -- a hold-your-breath thriller. The plot: Against all odds, CIA agent John Wells has penetrated al-Qaida, even campaigning against the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan. But he faces a double burden: Because he's an American, the terrorists don't fully trust him -- and because he has converted to Islam and spent so much time abroad in the company of bad people, the CIA no longer fully trusts him, either.

As the book unfolds, al-Qaida has some ugly plans for more terror attacks in the United States -- truck bombs, of course, but also biological terror and even a "dirty bomb," a radiological weapon of mass destruction. Wells plays a key role in the terror plot. But on whose side is he?

Reporter Berenson does well with the technical stuff: how to brew plague germs, uild truck bombs and plot a radiological attack. His CIA overlooks the niceties of international law when it comes to interrogating suspects.

His al-Qaida terrorists overlook niceties entirely. And against all odds, Berenson has set aside the stuffy, just-the-facts-Ma'am prose style of The New York Times. "The Faithful Spy" reads like, well, like a novel, one that's a grabber.

The Baltimore Sun:
Though almost five years have passed since the Sept. 11 attacks - a seeming eternity in an age of 24-hour news cycles and endless permutations and tribulations that constitute the Iraq war - many still beat the drum that it's "too soon" to explore the landscape of a post-Sept. 11 world. It's a mantra, thankfully, that hasn't stopped many literary and commercial fiction writers from grappling with the concept, even if there have been few standout efforts so far, and future titles (such as John Updike's
Terrorist and Martin Amis' short story collection starring hijacker Mohamed Atta) sound vaguely squirm-inducing.

Alex Berenson, a business reporter for The New York Times who reported on the war in Iraq in 2003, may have been told he was taking a serious literary risk by using the after-effects of Sept. 11 for his debut thriller. But if so, it's to our benefit that he's ignored those phantom critics and concentrated on building suspense, maintaining thrills and plotting a frighteningly plausible scenario. Save for a few rough patches in believability and pacing, this is a worthwhile first effort...

The Faithful Spy brims with knowledge, especially about the frightening tactics used in the name of war. The bombing scenes are startling for their visceral quality, and Berenson depicts the interrogation of a suspected al-Qaida terrorist but wisely allows his characters to make their own judgments for and against the procedures followed (or bent). But where the author shines most is in showing how a decade of isolation has affected Wells so much that he's alienated from his family and future, and that
fighting in a war that's difficult to win may be for the greater good - but can be a personal disaster.

military.com:
N.Y. Times reporter Berenson's first novel is a pulse-pounding, intelligent thriller that starkly reminds us what's at stake in the war on terrorism or more appropriately, the terrorists' war against America.

CIA agent John Wells is the only agent to ever penetrate al-Qaeda, but he's been out in the cold so long that the Agency brass have begun to question his loyalty. His only ally within the Agency is Jen Exley, his case officer, and even she encourages him to come in.

But, Wells is on to an al-Qaeda plot to attack America again and knows that the Agency will sideline him if he comes in. The plan, which combines a dirty bomb in Times Square and a parallel plot to spread a deadly strain of the plague, is a nightmare scenario that seems all too plausible.

Berenson keeps the plot racing ahead as the action moves from Pakistan to Afghanistan, Diego Garcia, Los Angeles, Atlanta, Montreal, and the Big Apple Ground Zero in the jihadis' wet dreams. The characters sometimes lean toward stereotypical, but the premise is intriguing, the details chillingly authentic, and the action vivid. Berenson shows that he knows how to put the thrill in thriller in an auspicious debut.

The Washington Post:
Let's give New York Times reporter Alex Berenson credit for the year's most surefire thriller plot: CIA agent infiltrates al-Qaeda. It's such a sky-high concept that the film rights were auctioned off months ago, and Keanu Reeves may play undercover agent John Wells. If the idea is an inspired one in terms of commercial fiction, Berenson's execution of it is less so, but "The Faithful Spy" offers a well-informed, often chilling look at how al-Qaeda might launch a major new attack in the United States -- and how one intrepid undercover agent might do his darnedest to foil it...

Berenson is very good on all the things you would expect a skilled reporter to be good on... his novel remains a timely reminder of the extremely precarious way we live now.

The Denver Rocky Mountain News (grade: A-):
"There hasn't been a fictionalized account of the intelligence war against al Qaeda until now. When you think of the hundreds of Cold War novels produced, it seems strange that it's taken so long. Happily, New York Times reporter Alex Berenson has successfully launched a new sub-genre, no-doubt the subject of many future books... Berenson has done a sharp job of pulling together possible what- ifs and combining them with a journalist's knowledge of how government and the military operate... He's already left (Tom) Clancy in the dust."

Kirkus Reviews (starred review):
"A thriller worthy of le Carré... The payoff is tremendous, and there are standout episodes that hint that the fundamentalists know how to work American decadence as when one terrorist recruits a patsy by telling him that it's all part of an audition for reality TV. Well done throughout, and sure to be noticed. After all, Keanu Reeves has already expressed interest in playing Wells."

Publishers Weekly:
"Berenson, a New York Times correspondent since 1999 who covered the occupation of Iraq, deftly employs the classic staples of spy fiction in his debut novel self-serving bureaucrats, a beautiful co-worker love interest and an on-the-run hero suspected of being a traitor - then mixes in current terror tropes: car bombs, smuggled nuclear material, and bio-weapons... Mounting suspense, a believable scenario and a final twist add up to a compelling tale of frightening possibilities. It's not for the squeamish, though: the torture sequences and bombing descriptions are graphic and chillingly real."

The Kansas City Star:
On the day the planes flew into the World Trade Center, undercover CIA agent John Wells, watching the jubilation on the part of those around him from his posting deep inside al-Qaida, vowed that such a thing would never happen again as long as he was alive.

His pledge is about to be put to the test, as Osama bin Laden's deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri, plans another attack on the United States. Without telling Wells any details, al-Zawahiri orders the American back home to await further instructions. Wells knows that his only chance to prevent the attack is to continue to masquerade as a willing martyr until he learns what he needs to do to stop the carnage.

He's convincing; so much so that his bosses at the CIA wonder if he has gone native.” After all, he didn't warn them about 9/11 (forget that he didn't know about it ahead of time), he hasn't been in touch since he penetrated al-Qaida, he has become a Muslim, and instead of checking in upon arriving in the States, he first visited his ex-wife and son.

One of the more hard-nosed bureaucrats wants to take him in immediately, while his former handler wants to wait. Wells senses the lack of trust and takes off, knowing that he's the country's only hope. When he finally learns what al-Zawahiri has in mind, it is a race to the end as the CIA closes in.

New York Times reporter Alex Berenson's experience covering the Middle East adds authenticity to the fictions of The Faithful Spy (344 pages; Random House; $24.95). This nail-biter is the best spy thriller I've read in a long, long while.