It’s up there with The Hunt For Red October by Tom Clancy, Freddie Forsyth’s The Day of the Jackal and Team Yankee, Harold Coyle’s brilliant 1987 novel imagining World War Three played out as a conventional conflict across the battlefields of Western Europe. US Navy Seal turned author Jack Carr, who made his name with The Terminal List in 2018, adapted into the unmissable Amazon Prime series starring Chris Pratt as Navy Seal Jack Reece, has turned to a prequel for his eighth book.
It’s a tale so gripping you’ll have trouble putting it down. But like all good fiction, it’s historically thought-provoking and intelligent too, set against the backdrop of Vietnam and the Cold War and featuring real-life events and characters. I typically read four or five books a week, plenty of thrillers and crime books among others, and Cry Havoc at 519 pages gripped me like a vice. I simply couldn’t put it down.
It’s no surprise he counts several British literary legends among his heroes. Carr, who grew up in Northern California, the son of a librarian, has said: “My early influences were the authors on my parent’s bookshelves: Fredrick Forsyth, Ken Follett, Robert Ludlum, John le Carré and Ian Fleming.”
Set in 1968, Carr’s new book features Jack’s father, Tom Reece, a special forces operator serving in Vietnam alongside local Montagnard mercenaries fighting with the US. As ever, Carr brilliantly lifts the lid on the shadowy world of special ops.
Reece is a MACV-SOG operator – part of the innocuously named US Military Assistance Command Vietnam, Studies and Observations Group – tasked with taking the fight across the borders into Laos, Cambodia and North Vietnam.
But what Tom doesn’t know is that an American spy ship, the USS Pueblo, captured off the coast of North Korea along with its 83 crew members, one of whom was killed, in a real-life incident in January 1968, has given Russia secret US codes and the Kremlin is sharing them with her North Vietnamese proxies.
Teams of seasoned operators are disappearing, feared ambushed, and killed or captured, as a Russian spy chief plays out his deadly games to humiliate the US. Cry Havoc takes readers from the jungles of Laos to Red Square to the White House and back and the pace never lets up. It’s genuinely pulse-pounding.
No wonder Jack Reacher creator Lee Child has called Carr “seriously good”.
You don’t have to have read Carr’s previous books to enjoy Cry Havoc, but I guarantee you’ll want to after finishing. Start with The Terminal List, which you can watch the thrilling 2022 TV adaptation via Prime. The second season, a prequel, Terminal List: Dark Wolf, was released in August focusing on Reece’s friend Ben Edwards, played by Taylor Kitsch, and his journey from Navy Seal to CIA operative.
Carr might come across as a typical ex-military type – merchandise on his website includes whiskey and a range of tomahawk-themed goods – but he writes with a deft, intelligent hand and an intimate knowledge of what sends men to war, how conflict affects them and, crucially, what happens next. Two decades as a Seal, including time as a sniper in Iraq and Afghanistan, have provided him with a remarkable understanding of modern warfare. And his imagination soars.
Growing up, Carr was an avid reader and, while serving, followed writers like Daniel Silva, Vince Flynn and Brad Thor, admittedly names better known across the Atlantic than in the UK. “I try to have my own voice,” he has said. “But I readily acknowledge the influence these masters of the craft have had on me and my writing.”
With Cry Havoc that voice has truly come to the fore. Carr is a literary superstar in the making.
- Cry Havoc by Jack Carr (Simon & Schuster, £9.99) is published on October 9