WILMINGTON, N.C. (WECT) – It seems hard to believe that more than twenty years have passed since Brad Thor introduced the world to Scot Harvath. Since his first thriller novel, Lions of Lucerne, published in 2002, Thor has taken the former Navy SEAL around the world on missions of national security and espionage, landing many of his books on what has become his second home, the New York Times best seller list.

After reading Shadow of Doubt, the 23rd thriller in the Harvath series releasing August 6th, I believe Thor will quickly find himself back in those familiar surroundings.

The veteran author doesn’t waste time getting to the jumping off point for his story. Pentagon analysts spot a Russian cargo plane being escorted by the latest-generation fighter jets, with no knowledge of where it’s headed or what it’s carrying. It lands near at a remote base near the capital of Belarus and taxis into a hangar. When the president of Belarus announces days later his country has received missiles and bombs from Russia that are more powerful than those the U.S. dropped on Japan in World War II, alarms go off inside the administration of American President Paul Porter.

“I needed a scene to open up the book with that I really wanted to grab people with, something short, crisp and really cinematic in the beginning,” Thor said. “And I was able to kind of string that throughout the book until the big finish at the end.”

Although it’s been a calendar year since readers have heard from Scot Harvath, only a few days have passed in his world since Dead Fall, Thor’s 2023 thriller that sent Harvath into Ukraine to rescue an American held hostage. He’s in need of a break, and is headed to spend time with his fiancé, Solvi Kolstad, who works for the Norwegian Intelligence Service. But when Solvi is tasked with bringing in a Russian defector, the CIA blackmails Harvath into keeping a quiet eye on the process. Instead, he tells Solvi and joins her effort, and along the way they uncover evidence of Russia infiltrating several intelligence agencies around the world. While Harvath works with Solvi and his old team, events unfold in Washington and Paris that deepen the intrigue into what Russia’s president is planning. Thor expertly crafts the three storylines until they intersect, and he makes the former Navy SEAL use all his experience and sheer guts to survive and prevent the start of World War III.

Thor’s followers on social media may have seen his recent post calling Shadow of Doubt ‘..the hardest (and most rewarding) book that I have ever written’. I asked him why.

“With every book, I’m trying to raise the bar,” Thor said. “That’s the challenge I set for myself with each book, to get better, to tell a better story each time I sit down to start a new book. In this book, you didn’t really see the bad guys until the end. Often times in my books, you’ll have a bad guy and you know, every X amount of chapters, we’ll drop back in and see things from the bad guy’s point of view. He’s picked a site where he’s going to detonate a bomb. Then in another chapter, we see he’s assembling the bomb components. There was none of that this time. You actually saw three different storylines of three different sets of good guys trying to unravel this plot. So, what’s fun is for the reader, they’re as much in the dark for most in the novel as my protagonist in the other good guys in Shadow of Doubt. And essentially what you have is, you’ve got three different sets of good guys, while something bad is barreling down on the world, and they’re all in their own special way trying to unpack and figure out what it is. So, you’re really in the car racing along with these three wonderful good guys trying to figure out what’s happening.”

Harvath also has the chance for revenge in Shadow of Doubt, to settle the score against those responsible for the death of his wife Lara, which happened in Thor’s 2019 best seller Backlash. Long time readers know higher-ups in the CIA want Harvath to consider scaling back his role in field ops, to adopt more of a leadership role in training the next generation of spies. It’s a split-second decision on whether retribution for Lara’s death must be carried out by his trigger-finger.

“Harvath for years has thought ‘the only reason I’m not taking a desk job is, nobody can do what I do as well as I do’,” Thor said. “That thing you’re referring to is him finally saying, ‘Maybe I can let go and let somebody do something this important’.”

Thor brings back several recurring characters in Shadow of Doubt, and fans should make sure they are buckled in because one of them drops a bit of a bombshell that even the author himself admitted was a surprise.

“Your job as a thriller writer is, when you look at a scene you open your mind and you take the first four things that come to you that could happen in that scene, and you throw them away,” Thor said. “That’s your job as a thriller writer. Then you take five, six and seven, because if I can think of the first four things that should happen in a scene, so can the reader. My job is to constantly be surprising the reader. I was as stunned probably writing that scene as you were reading it, because it just came out of the blue and I said, ‘I have to use that, because nobody will see that coming’.”

Brad Thor has often called his thrillers ‘Faction’, where the reader can’t tell where the facts end and the fiction begins. Readers of Shadow of Doubt will be left with a feeling of ‘Satis-Faction’, after they close the book on another wild ride provided by a master of the genre.

Shadow of Doubt is available August 6th.

To watch my full interview with Brad Thor, you can click here.

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