Run, Rucka, run!

Just finished Greg Rucka's latest Queen & Country novel The Last Run.  What a great read!  Picked it up Wednesday night and haven't been able to put it down.  As all of his Q&C books, this novel centers around Tara Chace, a Minder (Special Operations Officer) in the employ of the SIS, England's version of the CIA.

As the title hints at, Tara is thinking about retiring as a Minder, but as Rucka writes "There were only three ways a Minder ever left...They were promoted, they quit, or they died.  Most of them took option number three."  Tara has seen a few of her fellow Minders take option three, most notably Tom Wallace, the father of her now 5 year old daughter.  Tara gives her resignation, but not before she is called on to run one more operation, the extraction of a high level Iranian defector.  Rucka doesn't confine the story to the action on the ground; we also see the back room political dealings and intrigue as the mission is planned and then later after the mission is botched.

Greg Rucka has done a fair amount of comic writing for DC including co-writing 52 and runs on Wonder Woman, Checkmate and Gotham Central (which is where I first became enamored with his work) but has recently announced his departure from DC to focus on his own projects.  Hopefully this means more Queen & Country!