American Assassin

Mitch Rapp is a college lacrosse star whose life is shattered when his girlfriend, Katrina, dies in the 1988 Lockerbie bombing. Consumed by a need for vengeance, he is noticed by CIA recruiter Irene Kennedy and brought into a covert program that trains him to work outside the normal chain of command.

Under the hard instruction of veteran operative Stan Hurley, Rapp becomes a black-ops counterterrorism agent. His first assignments take him after an arms dealer in Istanbul and then to Beirut, where he goes in alone against an Islamic Jihad network holding captured colleagues.

American Assassin, published in 2010, is the origin story of Vince Flynn's Mitch Rapp series, set years before the earlier novels in the sequence.