Given the Trump administration’s interest in securing the Arctic cap via the annexation of Greenland and defending against the Intercontinental Ballistic Missile threat from Russia and China, Cold Zero is both geopolitical fiction and fact. But that’s typical of the intricately researched and characteristically prescient Brad Thor thriller. Add in the finely honed word-smithery of Ward Larsen, and you’ve got a thriller that hits like a bomb cyclone.

There are co-written thrillers that feel assembled, and then there are co-written thrillers that feel forged. Brad Thor and Ward Larsen’s new collaboration, Cold Zero, belongs squarely in the latter category. 

Co-authored novels are notoriously difficult to execute well. Too often, the seams show—voices shift, pacing becomes uneven, and the machinery of collaboration becomes visible on the page. The reader begins to see the scaffolding instead of the story.

Cold Zero avoids that problem entirely. It reads with the confidence and cohesion of a novel written by a single author operating at the top of his game.

That should not be surprising when you consider the résumés involved. Thor has spent more than two decades building one of the most successful franchises in modern political thrillers with his Scott Harvath series. Larsen, a former Air Force fighter pilot and, until recently, an airline pilot turned novelist, has carved out his own reputation for smart, technically credible thrillers that balance precision with narrative drive. “The more we got into it, the more we realized how little difference there was in the way we wrote and the way we approached our writing,”........

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