Sphere of Influence

Washington Post

Mills keeps the surprises coming fast and because his characters persist in making pithy...remarks about the powers that be.

Publishers Weekly

New York Times bestseller Mills (Burn Factor) returns with his fifth novel, featuring brilliant FBI tough guy Mark Beamon, who is investigating a terrorist threat linked to a global conspiracy. Killing time on a dead-end assignment while the Bureau plans his downfall, Beamon is thrown together with his former colleague Laura Vilechi when a videotape is delivered to the American media, indicating that Al Qaeda has smuggled a rocket launcher into the U.S. Their threat to use it against civilian targets has thrown the country into a panic, with people afraid to leave their homes. Meanwhile, Chet Michaels, one of Beamon's former trainees, now deep undercover in pursuit of a psychotic Mafioso, is nervously watching drug deals being made with shadowy Afghans. Looming behind all of this is a CIA deal with the devil (in the form of Christian Volkov, an international criminal mastermind), in which the U.S. government attempts to use organized crime figures as a proxy underworld army in the so-called war on terror. This thriller features real people and groups drawn from daily news headlines, playing on the anxieties of the American public-from the heroin trade to terrorism (and the connections between the two). But Mills avoids cynical exploitation, offering up human characters and a story that, despite some implausible subplots and heavy-handed editorializing, remains engrossing and affecting. Author tour. (Oct.) Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.

Library Journal

Reeled in from a dead-end job, outspoken FBI agent Mark Beamon is sent undercover to investigate a terrorist cell with access to modern missile technologyand promptly sees a fellow agent get murdered. From the author of The Burn Factor. Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

A CIA plot involving Afghan terrorists unsurprisingly blows up, requiring FBI solutions and assistance from an ethical and pleasant narco-trafficker. Mills brings back chain-smoking, out-of-shape FBI agent and ace investigator Mark Beamon (Free Fall, 2000, etc.), now Special Agent in Charge of the Phoenix office where he's floundering as an administrator, flubbing his evaluation, alienating his staff, mishandling his girlfriend, and in a funk. Unfortunately for the nation, but helpful for Beamon's mental state, a gang of Afghans has slipped through the border with a rocket launcher, four rockets, and tons of heroin. The terrorists quickly give the US a case of market-tanking jitters with their threat to pop off the rockets. Laura Vilechi, Beamon's colleague and best friend in the Bureau's upper reaches, reaches out for Beamon's help in finding that launcher and those Afghans, starting with a little pressure on the CIA, who, as is their custom, have been holding back helpful info about the world of evil. Beamon, who, despite his smoking and bad tailoring, is a Yalie, calls his chum, the president's chief of staff, and sets up a an interagency powwow. Indeed, the perfidious rats at Langley have been holding out on the Bureau, and they're not about to tell all now, certainly not about the intra-agency freelancing that brought about the latest round of terror. Beamon and Vilechi sort their way through the few available clues, getting shadowy assistance from Christian Volkov, an interglobal drug merchant first thought to be at the root of the troubles.The Volkov alliance will prove worrisome for Beamon, but the discomforts are smoothed by Volkov's sensational house chef and the comforts of thetrillionaire's many homes on many continents. And Volkov's a nice guy. Not like the terrorists of the Central Intelligence Agency. It will take many, many pages, several executions, countless cell-phone calls but no sex for Beamon to save the world. A technothriller without the hardware. Author tour