I've read a lot of Portland author Greg Rucka's comic books, but I'd somehow managed to avoid his novels until now. Though I try to read a little of everything, I don't often venture into military thrillers; the politics of your standard Tom Clancy ripoff tends to drive me daffy. But I like to give every genre its turn now and then, and Rucka's novels have been recommended to me on quite a few occasions, so I thought I'd give Alpha, the first book of a new series, a try.

I'm glad I did. Alpha doesn't diverge too dramatically from the formula of these sorts of books—the hero is (1) a Delta Force agent (2) named Jad Bell [?!!?] who (3) sleeps with and then skips out on a younger, sexy lady in the first part of the book and (4) eventually has to rescue his loved ones when they improbably get kidnapped in a terrorist attack—but Rucka is a fine storyteller. He doesn't mince words, for one thing; whereas many of these books are horse-chokers, Alpha clocks in under three hundred pages and moves at a crazy-fast clip throughout. And while most of these books are stuffed full of terminology and war porn for the backseat four-star-general crowd, Rucka clearly knows what he's talking about in terms of equipment and vocabulary, but he has the confidence to not try to overwhelm the reader with his encyclopedic knowledge.

This is definitely a thriller that thrills.

Bell is placed undercover in a huge theme park in an effort to avert a terrorist attack that may or may not happen. (Spoiler alert: It does.) There's a lot of violence involving people dressed up in cartoon mascot costumes, and lots of tricky situations involving hostages. Rucka doesn't waste a word, moving his characters around with an economy and rhythm that I wish every thriller-writer possessed. It's a smart, overstuffed action movie shoved inside two covers. And as an added bonus, there's none of that right-wing proselytizing common to the genre. I'm not saying that Alpha is for pacifists or has a politically correct agenda—there's a lot of violence and the terrorists tend to be pretty caricatured—but we don't get any of the lectures about the importance of torture for the preservation of a civil society or why the wimpy Democrats don't want America to be free or any of those other eye-roll-worthy sermons that happen so often in this sort of thing. Like the best thrillers, it's about the inevitable conflicts between two groups of people who are very good at what they do. That's the sort of story that everyone finds interesting.