“There is no hunting like the hunting of man, and those who have hunted armed men long enough and liked it, never care for anything else thereafter.” —Ernest Hemingway, Death in the Afternoon
Hemingway’s words succeeded Richard Connell’s The Most Dangerous Game by eight years. While the two authors were contemporaries in the sense they both were influenced by World War I and were most profilic in the interwar decades, there’s no real evidence that Hemingway was influenced by Connell’s work. Yet I imagine had he read it, based on his own experiences, Hemingway would have nodded right along.
In The Most Dangerous Man, Jack Murphy has crafted a modern retelling of The Most Dangerous Game, and has done an incredible job doing so.
Jeremy Lopez is a US Army Ranger, and a member of the little-known and very secretive Regimental Reconnaissance Company. He works as part of the intelligence gathering apparatus for JSOC, the Joint Special Operations Command, helping units like Delta Force or SEAL Team Six on their missions against high value targets. Unlike most in the intelligence business, Lopez is very much hands-on: he is on the ground, providing assistance in real time to the operators undertaking the mission at hand.
Currently working in West Africa, upon the completion of a mission, Lopez retires to his hotel in Niger’s capital city, and the bar therein. Where he meets an utter bombshell of a woman, who just so happens to spike his drink. The next thing he knows, he’s in a locked cell, in a place only God knows where.
The cell itself is a bit of an anomaly. There’s a miniature gym inside it, and Lopez is not only fed three meals a day, he’s fed three very good meals a day. Someone’s taking care of him despite his captivity. The reason for which is soon made abundantly clear, and it is not in Jeremy’s favor.
Lopez has been captured, alongside another member of a fellow intelligence team, by a South African tracker leading a hunting party of wealthy patrons, most notably from Silicon Valley. After successful hunts against the Big Five game animals, the hunters were looking for a new challenge. Their guide managed to get them on to reservations in Africa where they could hunt poachers, with the covert blessing of the governments involved. Two birds, one stone and all.
But even that proved boring to the tech bros, so their guide came up with a new scheme: give them a game that had a real fighting chance against them. So a trap was set for a Western military man, preferably a commando of some type. While Lopez isn’t the Navy SEAL the hunters all hoped he would be, they will soon learn what his capabilities really are.
Murphy has crafted an amazing, adrenaline-fueled barnburner of a thriller with The Most Dangerous Man. His pacing is terrific. His humanizing of Lopez, showing his foibles as well as his strengths, only endears him to the reader and gives you a hero to really root for. Some might think his villains as almost cartoonish, but anyone who’s really paying attention to the real tech bros out there will know that their ideas and beliefs are not as far-fetched as one might think.
I simply couldn’t put this book down, blowing through it in three days, and two of those were spent working eight hours each, where I didn’t have as much time to read. The action is propulsive and heart-pounding, and the reader is often left wondering, along with Lopez, just how he is going to survive. I cannot recommend this one enough!
5/5 phins
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