Mastermind by Andrew Mayne – Review

Published: September 7, 2021

Publisher: Thomas & Mercer

Series: Theo Cray and Jessica Blackwood #1

Genre: Thriller

Pages: 332 (Paperback)

My Rating: 4.5/5.0

A copy of this book was provided by the publisher in exchange for an honest review.

Synopsis:

Dr. Theo Cray and FBI agent Jessica Blackwood confront a cataclysmic conspiracy in a pulse-quickening thriller by the Wall Street Journal bestselling author of The Naturalist.

A mysterious electrical storm plunges Manhattan into darkness. As a strange, smothering fog rolls in, all communication crashes. In the blink of an eye, the island seems to vanish into a void.

FBI special agent Jessica Blackwood and brilliant scientist Dr. Theo Cray know this isn’t a freak accident. It’s a sinister sleight of hand. Their greatest adversary, a serial killer and cultist known as the Warlock, has escaped during a prison transfer in New York. A depraved master of manipulation, he promised the end of days. He’s making good on it.

One by one, cities across the globe are erupting in chaos as they disappear into the same black holes. Even for two ingenious trackers like Jessica and Theo, there’s still so much to learn about the pattern to the Warlock’s madness. The voids are just a warm-up for something bigger. To discover it—to stop it—Jessica and Theo must descend into the darkest of shadows—and minds.

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Oh boy, was I ever excited to see a new series co-starring Theo Cray! After the ending of the Naturalist series, I suspected there were great and exciting things in store for Cray, but one never really knows. This new series also stars Jessica Blackwood, a character from another of Andrew Mayne’s thrilling books series that I haven’t yet picked up. That will be changing soon because she was an awesome counterpart to Theo Cray!

Mastermind begins with a bang – what appears to have been a terrorist attack has isolated a section of New York City – and then segues into a quick intro to Jessica Blackwood, agent extraordinaire. As I mentioned, I haven’t read the Jessica Blackwood trilogy yet, but that didn’t stop me from diving headlong into this story. The quick intro we get, plus the fairly seamless summary of what she’s been involved with helped me get up to speed. The short of it is as follows: an unknown terrorist organization used some sort of organic EMP to knock out a large section of NYC’s power and communications and the resulting black smoke thoroughly obfuscated the city and anyone inside the area that might have been involved in the attack. The joint government agencies slapped together a list of possible culprits, and none other than one Theo Cray was on it.

Cut to Theo, up to his eyeballs in shit, in the custody of some folks he’s been routinely killing off like a vigilante Rambo. Jessica Blackwood shows up in the nick of time to smuggle him out of the country (and out of the custody of a suspicious new US government agency). They bounce through multiple countries, creepy secret labs, and even more exciting places before the story concludes.

I’ve got to say, this might be the most exciting story I’ve read from Andre Mayne yet. I totally loved the dynamic between Cray and Blackwood and this story picked up right from the get go and the action was intense! While this does seem to heavily relate to the Jessica Blackwood series plot, I didn’t feel like I had missed too much by having not read it yet. It’s a really fun mash up of secret agent meets mad scientist and there is definitely some suspension of disbelief required, but it’s SO AWESOME.  

I can’t wait for the next book in the series, but in the meantime, I have plenty of Mayne’s other books to check out.