Yesterday, Brad Thor gave fans a heads up that he’d be revealing the title of his 2018 thriller “very soon.”
He wasn’t kidding!
Revealing the title of my 2018 thriller very soon. Sign up to see it first: https://t.co/QzMMtptP9y pic.twitter.com/7kmfX3X55i
— Brad Thor (@BradThor) August 22, 2017
Just fifteen hours after posting his tweet, Thor sent out a newsletter to his fans first thing this morning announcing that his next Scot Harvath thriller, which will come out sometime in the summer of 2018, will be titled Spy Master.
Leave it to Brad Thor to spice things up in the middle of the week!
Presumably, Spy Master will follow this year’s Use of Force, which debuted at #2 on the New York Times bestsellers list, and will be the seventeenth novel in Thor’s popular Scot Harvath series.
Thor, along with Daniel Silva, is widely regarded as one of the two best political thriller novelists working today. Over the past few years, he’s really taken his franchise to another level by adding deeper character development to his ripped-from-the-headlines scenarios, and hard-hitting action sequences. That was especially true with Use of Force, which opens the door for some changes in Harvath’s life moving forward.
While I won’t explain my full theory due to potential spoilers, my early guess is that the title points to Harvath’s mentor, Reed Carlton. In fact, Carlton is specifically referred to as a “spymaster” in every one of Thor’s books since the author first introduced him in Foreign Influence (Full Black, Black List, Hidden Order, Act of War, Code of Conduct, Foreign Agent, and Use of Force) back in 2010.
In fact, in Full Black, Thor describes Carlton, who Harvath refers to as the Old Man, as “one of the nation’s longest-serving and most revered spymasters.”
A little quick research shows that while the word directly in front of “spymaster” changes throughout the books–ranging from “iconic” (Foreign Agent) to “legendary” (Use of Force)–the precedent was set early on when readers first meet Carlton after Thor introduced him as “one of the nation’s most revered spymasters” in Foreign Influence.
There is no doubt that Reed Carlton is a spymaster… but is he the Spy Master that the title of Thor’s next thriller seems to hint at? I guess we’ll find out next summer!