The main character, Courtland Gentry, also known as the Gray Man, is a former CIA agent. He’s an assassin turned contractor who assumes the code name Violator or Six, and always takes readers on a great ride as he battles the bad guys.
The action begins on page one and never lets up.
After five years on the run dodging CIA assassins, Gentry is suddenly called back to the American espionage organisation. His first mission gets off to a distinctly difficult start when within hours of his arrival to Hong Kong in a CIA plane, two Chinese agents try to kill him in a hotel.
However, Gentry disposes of them, and then his high-stakes hunt for answers sees him criss-cross southeast Asia, involved with or opposed by parts of various national armies, governmental agencies and Triad or other criminal gangs.
It also leads to his old friend, the former British MI6 operative Donald Fitzroy, who is being held hostage by the Chinese after failing on a contract to find Fan Jiang, a former member of an ultra-secret cyber warfare unit responsible for testing China's own security systems, and who has defected.
The Chinese want Fan killed, but the first two teams Fitzroy sent to find him have disappeared and the Communists have now decided to ‘supervise’ the next operation at a high intelligence level. What they don’t know is that Gentry’s mission is to find Fan and get whatever intelligence he has to the US. To do that, all he has to do is to get out alive and, being the quixotic man, save his old friend as well.
Geo-politics comes into play as both the Russians and Americans race to capture Fan for his knowledge of the Chinese computer systems. But also in the mix are Chinese agents who are attempting to assassinate Fan before he divulges any state secrets.
Against seemingly overwhelming odds, Gentry must use his wits and moral code to complete the mission. The characters in this novel are well developed, and the plot suspenseful.
The Gray Man is a complex figure but he enjoys the support of readers who will root for someone with integrity. He is a good person who must do some bad things sometimes, in order to succeed.
The female lead, Zoya Zakharova, is a beautiful Russian foreign intelligence agent assigned to bring Fan Jiang to Russia. She is Gentry’s adversary who is also his equal, a female kindred spirit. They eventually become friends and partners in the fight to stay alive. Readers will hope that she and Gentry will appear together in future books because the interaction between them is superb.
As with all of Gray Man books, the excitement, tension, and action are never ending.
From start to finish, Gunmetal Gray impresses with a well laid-out plot and enough action to keep thriller fans on the edge of their seats. Between the Clancy books and the Gray Man series, nobody is on a hotter streak right now than Mark Greaney.
