This is book 2 of the "Clandestine Operations" series.

This note contains spoilers for the book.

By Griffin and his son Wiilliam E. Butterworth IV (which really kind of blows the pseudonym!).

But I imagine he's not trying to keep us in ignorance of his actual name, he's more interested in associating the new books with his successful older books so as to boost sales.

And I finally figured out why they've been using that not very good snapshot of the two of them consistently as their joint author photo. I finally read the credits—that photo is credited to Tom Clancy.

Second book on the German end of the Operation Ost situation. We've got Cletus Frade as a minor character showing up in Germany periodically. So, not absolutely clear why he's labeling these as a separate series; they're clearly in the same universe at least.

Like most of his recent books, these are pretty much day-by-day diaries of what the characters do. Certainly some amount of dull stuff is skipped over, but they aren't really shaped to build to a climax, or in any other conventional way look like a novel. I don't actually mind this particularly, now that I've realized it's what's going on. (It goes back quite a ways, took me a while to recognize it.)

So, in this one, we capture and turn a Soviet spy who got far to close to Operation Ost, and then have to get his wife and children out of the Soviet Union. The hard parts of that are handled by an agent in place, probably primarily a Mossad agent but one who cooperates with the USA as well. They actually manage an incursion across the border and picking up the civilians without anybody even getting shot at.

Also, Captain James Cronley comes to terms with the fact that he's chief, DCI-Europe, primarily to have a convenient scapegoat handy for when it all falls apart (to protect the President, basically). He decides he's okay with this.