Midnight Black

Midnight Black is the 14th novel in the Gray Man series, with the first installment, The Gray Man, published in 2009. Informed by author Mark Greaney’s academic background in international relations, the espionage saga focuses heavily on global politics, its landscape stretching from the US to Russia to Pakistan and beyond. The specific focus of the novel is covert espionage operations, often carried out by CIA members in tandem with non-official covers (NOCs) or deniable assets, agents whom a government can deny knowing if they are captured. Deniability allows governments to conduct sabotage missions in other countries, which would otherwise be seen as a breach of international law. Court, the eponymous Gray Man, is a former CIA agent who once worked as an NOC; however, after being betrayed by the agency, Court works as a freelance international assassin, only accepting jobs he deems morally righteous in the larger scheme of things.

The plot of Midnight Black continues from developments in which Court meets Zoya Zakharova (in Gunmetal Gray, published 2017), an SVR (Russian intelligence) agent who becomes a CIA asset. Zoya’s father was the head of the GRU, another Russian intelligence agency. Over the course of the next few novels, Zoya and Court’s relationship develops.