New Books In Literature

The next time you head to the beach or settle in for a long plane ride, you may not want your imagination filling with images of rogue operatives planting traps or terrorist organizations plotting against unsuspecting victims. You wouldn’t want to imagine explosions, assassinations, or .50 caliber rounds ripping through steel. No way. We get enough of those worries from the news. And yet there is an experience where these things go from worrisome to worry-free, where watching men and women fight for their lives is—yes—fraught and nail-biting, but also a lot of fun. And that experience happens when you’re reading a good military thriller. Today I chat with Matthew Quirk, who’s written a great one. It’s entitled Cold Barrel Zero (Mulholland Books, 2016), and I’m afraid I can share with you much of its plot. It’s so full of twists and turns, reversals and surprises, that just about any description of it will result in a spoiler, so I’ll just ask Quirk to take on that