I haven't read this author before, just picked up the book because it was on the NY Times bestseller list. This was 9th in a series of books with John Wells as the main character so I will go back to the first and start reading. ( )

Book 9 in the John Wells series, but more importantly the sequel to The Counterfeit Agent. A multi-billionaire continues to manipulate events and evidence to incite the US to attack Iran to preclude their efforts to develop nuclear weapons. After a solid beginning, the book spends too much time reviewing what happened in the other book, but as the 12 day timeline ticks down to zero, the action accelerates and Ellis Schafer, Vinny Duto and John have to gamble to find the evidence to avoid an invasion of Iran. These guys manage to pull in favors from Israelis and Saudis alike. Enjoyable. The billionaire's cut-out Salome is a solid element in the story: self assured, clever, manipulative, and strong of spirit. ( )

Book #9, in the John Wells series

After book # 8, I needed to take a long break from this series in fact it has been over 4 ½ years since I read “The Counterfeit”, why did I wait so long to get to “Twelve Days” ….I really had enough with problems between the US and Iran, this series was getting stale to me….I finally had to put it on my read shelf once and for all so here I am with my thoughts…..

“Twelve Days”, starts where the prequel left us. If you pick up this series here, no worries, there is a lot of information dumps for the new readers to catch up, although I recommend you read the previous installments first. This series is built around John Wells, an American intelligence operative and the main focus is a countdown to battle between the US and Iran.

It opens with a bag. A shoulder –fired rocket brings down a passenger jet. Iran is suspected to be behind this tragedy. The fictional US president has then decided that Iran has a bomb and has ordered strikes against the country, given 12 days to come clean…but Iran doesn’t really have the bomb…. So what then… our super-human goes through a series of adventures and misadventures to save the day and at times he does entertain us.

Unfortunately, this story tends to meander way too much. A good part is essentially recaps of the previous books. It seems the author was struggling to fill the pages to give us the action we came to expect. Wells is all over the place he jumps from the Middle East, to Russia, to South Africa and to the US while battling his own government which is convinced the evidence against Iran is solid. What a conspiracy theory….12 days countdown till the last hour… can this scenario be possible? No it sounds unrealistic/unbelievable for a government to do this….or could this happen someday….or could a third party as suggested in this plot be behind this kind of conspiracy…..

I had a hard time staying with this book. It took way to long, not until half way through before the author gets going from there finally the story picks up and the plot has some spring into it. Most action scenes are bland some are captivating but nothing original comes out and things drags on and on and on…..finally Wells save the day and the world is a better place for it….haha ( )

I've been a big fan of the John Wells series since the beginning, and I think the author has done an admirable job in 'maturing' the character. Twelve Days is a nice addition to the catalog but it has more weaknesses than I've seen in previous books. It's still very well written, but I had a little trouble in how the perspective of the narration changed throughout the book. It seemed that you'd made progress and understood the flow of the story, but the next chapter or the one after that may roll it back and tell it with a different character's voice. I've experienced that technique many times and it usually adds context to the story line, but in this case it didn't provide much value.

The action is fast-paced, that's for sure. Wells is at it again doing what he does best, but this time he's way under the radar and has a deadline to meet to, as usual, save the world (or a part of the world, anyway). The writing is propulsive, the dialogue is decent, but the story was weak in a couple areas, specifically in the Russian sequence and in the ending confrontation (trying not to play spoiler here....). Both seemed to stretch believability a little too far, one situation relying on luck and the other with a failure to anticipate scenarios leading to a potentially rough outcome.

Anyway, this is an action-packed John Wells novel that will satisfy your Berenson fiction craving. It's not his best and, in my opinion, the Wells character is getting a little long in the tooth. However, it's a good read and any Wells story is better than none at all! ( )

I knew this would be a difficult read for me as early as page 17, when the author, for whatever reasons are his own, decided to have the main character, an American, be a convert muslim.

For me this did not fit right from the jump. It is my observation that islam is the antithesis of a Constitutional Republic, they can never coexist, as they are diametric opposites.

Many would respond to that observation by saying it is only the small minority of muslims who are radical, I disagree!(actually, radical is a misnomer, they are really "fundamentalists"). There is an apt description of muslims in my view: "A radical (fundamentalist) muslim will chop off your head if you are an infidel, the moderate muslim will hold your feet while he does it". Additionally, the question remains hanging fire as it has for many, many years: when will the so-called moderate muslims in America, and elsewhere, start protesting the atrocities of the fundamentalists? Where have they been hiding, and continuing to hide all these years?

Accordingly, having the protagonist cast as a muslim convert, fighting diligently to keep America safe does not fit, and this shaded my entire reading of Berenson's book. It just does not work.

I realize this is only a book. My statements are only my review, and I think Berenson's depiction of Wells as a muslim was wholly gratuitous. It turned me off his book and turned me off on venturing into reading anything else he has written or might write. Reading "Twelve Days" was akin to having someone throw a wet blanket on you and tell you to enjoy the story from underneath it... ( )