FULL BLACK BY BRAD THOR: A Review

Brad Thor’s greatest achievement is the courage to expose, using the language of fiction, the most double-tongued enemy of humanity at the moment—terrorism. One the one hand, our society supports murderers and terrorists in the name of political correctness, and on the other, accepts victimization as a natural course of things. In Full Black, Brad Thor is evidently intolerant toward double standards of all kind.

A thriller is supposed to hook the reader from the first page and take him or her on a journey of excitement, fulfilling adventures, and invigorating drama. Full Black offers it all in full quantities. Action and bloodshed are common in American thrillers. Full Black is no exception. This is the beauty of Full Black that it knows its way around in the maze of the craft as well as in the business of thrilling a reader. The novel gives us another adventure in the life of Brad Thor’s celebrated protagonist Scot Harvath.       

Former Navy SEAL Team 6 member Scot Harvath realizes that a software with evil intentions created to track down and locate terrorist links in the US has been sold in black market and has been altered and reworked on by the intelligence services of certain other nations. This software can search through emails, phone calls, text messages, electric and water bills, etc. And, yes, bank records too. Nothing could be scarier than this. What do we do when we come across information that is scary or unsettling while reading fiction? Often, we tend to say, ‘Oh, it’s just a story,’ right? And feel comfortably housed in our small world of banalities. Full Black does not give us that option.

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In Brad Thor’s own words, Full Black is a faction. A faction is a mode of writing stories where the author uses facts to support fiction. The difficult part in this type of a novel is to separate fact from fiction. There simply is not enough room for such an act. The evil software is real, as real as your computer screen on which you read this review right now.

PROMIS is the name of that deadly weapon. And US intelligence did use it to track down those who are under suspicion. This software could also be used to track any other individual. For those who have already known that privacy is a myth in twenty-first century, technological inventions such as PROMIS is no surprise, but cause for concern.  

For Scot Harvath, saving people in apparent danger from the exposure to lack of privacy is impossible. What he can do though is to use the same program with the help of one of his colleagues at the organization he works for against the enemies of the state. A patriot to his bone, Scot Harvath exposes many attacks planned by Islamic terror groups on the US soil. Then Harvath learns about “one of the biggest terrorist threats the United States has ever faced: complete and total collapse.” When the identity of the people involved comes up Harvath realizes that he is unable to trust anyone, except the guys he works with. This forces Scot Harvath to go ‘full black’. From page one to the ending line of the book, Brad Thor keeps the reader hooked and wanting more.

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Mr. Thor’s storytelling strategy is copybook style. He does not experiment with his craft much. For any newbie writer, Brad Thor is a good example to learn how important it is to stick to the basics in professional writing. The impact of the book is undeniable.

The Carlton Group, a private intelligence organization working for the CIA under the leadership of former Navy SEAL Reed Carlton has only one policy to follow when deploying their top gun. To Scot Harvath, Reed Carlton would only suggest a three word mantra: find, fix, finish. The same was the motto of Carlton group.

The phrase “full black” is also from a formal designation some black operations have in real life. There are black operations that exist in the shadow of the secret operations community. Full Black opens with a description of what is known as ‘unrestricted warfare’, a secret strategy device by the Chinese to “assist in and to encourage the destruction of America”. As you move on through the book, amazing facts and surprising twists await you in this edge-of-the-seat thriller. Full Black is full of thrills.

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