Black Ops

This is by far the best of the Presidential Agent series. Since Griffin's writing style is to repeat the important events of this series over and over again, new readers of the Presidential Agent series can skip earlier book of this series and start the adventures of Charlie Castillo with the Black Ops. The narrator is Dick Hill for the first 5 books who does a great job of bring the characters to life. The most recent book of this series is the Outlaws, which continues the story of Charlie Castillo and his new friends, two former Russian SVR spies. I recommend listening to that book after the Black Ops. The narrator of Outlaws is Jonathan Davis, who does a great job as well. Some reviewers have been critical of Jonathan Davis compared to Dick Hill, but I believe he does an equally great job with the characters as Dick Hill did in the earlier books of this series.
I don't know if it was the change in narrators or the addition of WEB IV as co-author, but there is big personality shift in the character of Ambassador Montvale the Director of National Intelligence, who is an arrogant *** in the Black Ops and a good guy in the Outlaws.
I have listened to all of the books in the Presidental Agent series several times and recommend the entire series as well as the Honor Bound series. Both of these series use Argentina as the site for much of the activities, since the author (WEB III) lives there for part of the year.

This audio book is probably 5 times too long. I found myself wondering if anything of interest was ever going to happen.
I think I was more interested in Max the main character's dog who would relieve himself on Charlie's plane after each landing. Max has some puppies and the interactions he has with the mother are more believable than the conversations the humans have.


You have been warned.

TOO many characters
TOO much dialogue
TOO little action
TOO TOO long

Had a very tough time following the story and gettig into the charecters.

if you are looking for action this is not for you

Narrator created ridiculous voices for the characters. This book is nothing like the past in it's series.

By far the worst read I have ever purchased from Audible. After finishing a le Carr? novel, which I enjoyed tremendously, I thought I would continue in the spy genre so I purchased this New York Times bestseller. Suffice it to say that it read like the wet dream of a 15 year old video game aficionado undergoing a testosterone storm. However, the language and plot structure were far below the level of most 15 year-old authors. The icing on the cake was the narrator's childish sense of irony and his ridiculous repertoire of accents.

The book was OK - but there were a few things I didn't like. First - no real Russian spy would magically fall in love with spy who she defected too. It was just too cheesy. Second - despite all the tension & sneaking around - there weren't any ops in the book until the end. I thought there would be more action & less cheesy love.

I enjoyed the other Presidential Series books with Charlie Castillo. This one was tedious because it seemed to be mostly people sitting around making conversation. The conversations told the story, but they also told part of the stories in the previous books. This book had a good story and a good ending that opened up new adventures for Charley, but it could have had about 30 percent edited out.

I'm sorry the book is over, I can't wait for the sequel .
This is one of the best of all his bboks.