Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
People hear me talk about thriller novels a lot, and
listeners will email me, email me, or text me or
meet me somewhere and say, you know what, what should
I read? And and and I always I always tell
him I I think the most thrilling thrillers are by
Mark Grainey, his gray Man series, although he does other
(00:21):
stuff too that's also great. The gray Man series what
he's best known for, and he's got a new one
out it's called Midnight Black. I have read the entire thing,
of course, as I do with all of all of
Mark's books.
Speaker 2 (00:34):
And he joins us again on the show.
Speaker 1 (00:36):
Mark, very very good to see you here, Thanks for
thanks for joining you.
Speaker 3 (00:40):
Bet Ross good to be here.
Speaker 1 (00:42):
So a couple of things I want to talk about
regarding this book.
Speaker 2 (00:45):
It is it is thinly veiled.
Speaker 1 (00:49):
Would just makes the veil sound thicker than it is,
a thinly veiled conversation about Navalney and his wife and Putin,
and in a sense, one of the things.
Speaker 2 (01:02):
I really liked so much about this story.
Speaker 1 (01:04):
I don't know if you know this, but I studied
Soviet politics in college and I'm very interested in all
this stuff. Although it was way before putin in a sense,
your story. It's a thriller, but it's kind of aspirational
for something that could happen to Russia.
Speaker 3 (01:20):
Yeah, that's a really good way of putting it.
Speaker 4 (01:21):
This is my twenty six published novel, and in the
first twenty five books I wrote, I was always thinking
about trying to hit the geopolitics directly on the head
for the day the book comes out.
Speaker 3 (01:32):
You start writing these a year and a half or
a year before.
Speaker 4 (01:34):
They come out, and I'm always trying to hit it
exactly the way I think is going to be.
Speaker 3 (01:38):
But for this book, I told myself I.
Speaker 4 (01:40):
Wanted to be more hopeful than I expected to find
the world when it comes out.
Speaker 3 (01:45):
My character, who is basically based on Alexi.
Speaker 4 (01:48):
Navalni, is named Nathan Yarrovoy, and he's still alive. He's
being worked to death in a prison.
Speaker 3 (01:54):
He doesn't have.
Speaker 4 (01:55):
Long to live, but he is still alive. His wife
is in prison as well. But also in other ways,
I wanted the story to be more hopeful. There's a
Russian resistance that's in this story and that that actually
exists in Russia, but I just.
Speaker 3 (02:08):
Made it more organized and more.
Speaker 4 (02:10):
Sort of ideologically pure and there's a few things I
did where I said, all right, I'm going to understand
the real world, but I'm going to tweak it a
little bit to make this a great story.
Speaker 1 (02:20):
Yeah, you know, at the at the end of the
last book, you knew that court Gentry the gray Man
was going to have to do something to rescue his
the love of his life was a Rozoya who's a Russian.
Speaker 2 (02:36):
But you know much more than than that.
Speaker 1 (02:39):
And I'm curious whether at the when you were finishing
the last book, did you already have an idea that
this book was going to have a plot like this.
And I don't mean just rescuing her, but the other
stuff now.
Speaker 3 (02:55):
Just the most general stuff. You know.
Speaker 4 (02:57):
I remember when I finished the last book, going, well,
this is great. I know what the next book's going
to be about. But you know, that little one sentence
the hero goes to Russia to rescue and the woman
he loves. That doesn't get you through one hundred and
fifty thousand words. And as I started writing it, I
was like, Okay, you know, in the real world, the
enemy gets a vote. You know, what is the enemy
(03:19):
doing here? And what twists and turns can we throw
in here to where people don't just say, oh, he's
going to go in there and he's going to fight
some people and he's going to get the girl and
then he's going.
Speaker 3 (03:27):
To get out of there. This book has got so
much more to it than that.
Speaker 4 (03:32):
And so I started thinking about the Cold War, and
I studied that stuff back then as well, and I
just wrote this book as if it was a Cold
War era novel about the Soviet Union. Even though it's Russia,
it's such a police state and the cleptocracy and the
corruption and the Kremlin, the militancy of what's going on,
(03:53):
it's all very similar to what was happening in the eighties,
and I wanted to tell that type of his story.
Speaker 3 (03:57):
So that's what.
Speaker 4 (03:58):
Grew out of, out of that initial one sentence of
going to Russia.
Speaker 1 (04:03):
Yeah, and you know, for listeners, again, the book is
called Midnight Black, and you know, we mentioned that it
includes a hint of a love story. But I mean
you're talking about stuff here involving spies on both sides,
military Americans, Russians, Ukrainians. It's just it's a very dynamic story.
I mean, all of all of the Gray Men books are,
(04:23):
but this is a really dynamic story. And I'll tell you, Mark,
this is a funny thing every every once in a
while when I'm reading fiction, especially fiction by really good writers,
where there's more than a kernel of truth to it,
there's a lot of real stuff going on there. And
I put you and Jack and Brad thor you know,
(04:45):
into that category. And I've I've studied a lot about Russia.
So I'm reading, I'm reading the book. I'm reading the book,
and I'll just I'll just read a little here. Three
hundred miles southeast of Moscow, the Republic of Mordovia sits
in the Volga River basin, a land of rolling plains,
thick forests, and backbreaking industry. Fifteen prisons got the settlements
(05:07):
and forests of the district of Zubovo Polansky on the
western side of the state, and fifteen prisons together are
referred to by the Russian government as a penal fiefdom.
Speaker 2 (05:18):
So when I first.
Speaker 1 (05:19):
Read that, Mark, I thought, that is some fabulous artistic
license by Mark Brainey to make up some new place
in Russia. And then I went and looked it up
and the place is freaking real.
Speaker 4 (05:30):
Yeah, yeah, So you know, in the nineteen thirties, Joseph
Stalin created the gulog system, and there's still like in
Russia today, there's seven hundred and something federal penitentiaries of
one style or another. And so there is a place
in Mordovia in Russia called Yk two Javis, which is
a women's correctional colony where there's hard labor and women
(05:54):
are put there. And so I did all the research
that I could. Some of the research I did on
the gulag system. They don't call them gulogs anymore, but
they're the same buildings and the same fences in the
same barbed wire, I guess, And I did, you know,
a lot of the research I did was reading older
books about Soviet era prison time, because there's not a
whole lot of contemporary stuff. There's news about it in
(06:17):
some videos and things, but a lot of it was
reading the old stuff. But yeah, that aspect of the
story is all sadly, very real and very stark and shocking.
Speaker 2 (06:27):
I guess you read some soul John Eatson.
Speaker 3 (06:31):
Yeah, oh yeah, I read Gulog Archipelago. Yeah, you have
to do things I read research one.
Speaker 2 (06:36):
You'd have to. So I'm curious how warm and welcoming.
Speaker 1 (06:41):
Were they to you when you went for a tour
at Yavas and asked them about the place?
Speaker 3 (06:48):
Yeah, so the.
Speaker 4 (06:49):
State Department has a complete do not travel advisory into Russia. Now,
if you went, and it's not because I'm anything special,
any of us who went, any of your listeners who
would go there would probably be picked up and hell
to be traded back for someone in the West. But
you might be sitting in a cell for a couple
of years before that happens. Fortunately, I have been to Russia,
(07:09):
and I went to Russia when I was working on
a book with Tom Clancy before he passed away, and
so I have all my videos and there are scenes
in this book that are in Gorky Park, in the
Moscow subway stations and things like that, and places that
I've actually been in videos that I was able to
refer to and notes that I had to make it real.
(07:30):
I have never been to a Russian penal colony, and.
Speaker 3 (07:34):
I hope to keep it that way.
Speaker 4 (07:36):
Yeah, you know, that's where the artistic license came in.
Speaker 1 (07:39):
We're talking with Mark Greeney about his fantastic new gray
Man novel called Midnight Black. You should definitely go buy
it and read it. And you you don't need to
have read previous gray Man books to love this book.
Speaker 2 (07:54):
You don't need to go buy them and read them all.
Speaker 1 (07:56):
You probably should, but you don't need to enjoy this book.
Speaker 3 (08:00):
Now.
Speaker 1 (08:02):
Part of what happens in the book is that Court
Gentry needs to get into Russia and try to connect
with the Russian resistance to save his girlfriend or whatever
you want to call Zoya.
Speaker 2 (08:15):
And as part of that process, he meets with the.
Speaker 1 (08:20):
Father of someone he's trying to connect with. And I'm
gonna read again from the book. So this is an
old Russian man speaking in the book. He said, I
pray that someday the suffering will end. But I don't
worry about myself or my wife we've lived. I care
about the younger generations. With a shrug, he said, my generation,
(08:43):
the generation after mine, we've had our chance to make
this nation a better place. He looked up at Court
and the American could hear the pain in the old
man's words, and here we are. That really that really
struck me as well. And I'm wondering whether that sense
of you know how much we've failed future generations in
(09:05):
the mind of older Russians. Is that a creation of
your imagination what you hope they think, or did you
talk to some old Russians and get that kind of perspective?
Speaker 3 (09:17):
You know, I didn't.
Speaker 4 (09:18):
I didn't talk to anyone that that relayed that. I
looked at what resistance exists in Russian now, and I
tried to make it more helpful than than it really was.
Speaker 3 (09:31):
A lot of the resistance groups.
Speaker 4 (09:33):
I could have used actual names of resistance groups, but
some of them are kind of ideologically not that pure.
I let's say they're they're very much anti Putin, but
they're also anti Semites or whatever. So I didn't use
anyone directly. But you know, I just have this sense that,
you know, all these people that work so hard in
the eighties to help the Soviet Union fall, and there
(09:56):
was a lot of resistance in the former public than
in Russia itself. They you know, in the nineties, everything
just went to hell there in a different way, and
then Putin took power really in ninety nine to two
thousand and for a quarter century, he's managed to hold
onto power, and he will hold on a power until
(10:16):
he dies. And so there just has to be this
belief of these people that gave their lives to make
their country a better place that you know there was.
There was ten years there where they didn't have a
complete autocrat and power, but who they had in power
were drunk and corrupt.
Speaker 3 (10:33):
And it's really really.
Speaker 4 (10:35):
Sad because I know there's lots of great Russians, and
there are Russians fighting on the side of the Ukrainians
and battalions in Ukraine.
Speaker 3 (10:41):
So these people exist.
Speaker 4 (10:43):
I just I think I just sort of expanded on
them a little bit for the boat.
Speaker 2 (10:50):
One more question for you.
Speaker 1 (10:51):
The Russian spy who sort of manipulated the Gray Man
into coming into Russia, which itself is just a fabulous
thread throughout this book. Is he based on someone in particular,
or based on a story in particular, or is that
you know from your imagination.
Speaker 3 (11:13):
Well, it's mostly fiction.
Speaker 4 (11:15):
So the FSB which is Russian domestic intelligence, and the
GRU is Russian military intelligence, and the SBR is Russian
foreign intelligence. Although it all gets very very muddied, especially
when you're talking about the former Soviet republics, because you
would think they're foreign countries. Now they're not part of Russia,
but Russia uses their domestic intelligence agencies in those countries.
(11:36):
They call it the near abroad, which is kind of
their way of saying, we're going to hold onto these
areas and as far as we're concerned, they're still domestic.
But these three intelligence agencies are at war with each
other in Russia, all sorts of backstamping and things like that,
and I really wanted to play up on that. So
I created this character Baranov, who's this FSB colonel and
(11:57):
he doesn't trust the GRU and he has dealings with
them in this he doesn't trust the SVR, which is Zoya,
the woman who he's who is in prison there that
of course trying to get. She's former SVR. So there's
just I want to just add a lot of intrigue
to this story. So it just wasn't a straight up
war book or a straight up you know, uh, just
(12:18):
a John Wick story. I wanted it to have some
other layers to it, and I thought barring off would.
Speaker 3 (12:23):
Be a good way to do that.
Speaker 1 (12:24):
And I'll just tell folks who are who are listening,
you know, we've we've talked about Midnight Black a lot
from the kind of historical and intellectual and spy story side,
but a significant percentage of this book is also action
and you know, raids and paramilitary scenes and all and
and fighting.
Speaker 2 (12:45):
And so it's it's a great balance.
Speaker 1 (12:46):
It's exactly what you want from a thriller, which is
always always what you get from Mark Greeney.
Speaker 2 (12:53):
How far are you into the next book?
Speaker 3 (12:56):
Not far enough? I'm you know, I'm plugging away. It'll
be due this.
Speaker 4 (13:01):
Summer and I'm going to go to Northern Ireland and
do some research there for that book, that book fifteen,
which is the one I'm working on now, and it'll
be out. They always come out in February, so it'll
be out.
Speaker 3 (13:12):
I'll get it done.
Speaker 4 (13:13):
But I wish I was a little further along than
I am, but that's where I am every year.
Speaker 1 (13:16):
Now, well, let's I'd love to work with you and
your people to host an event for you for the
book tour for that one, if we can, if we
can make it happen, I think that would be just
great to have you here in Denver. Mark Grainy's new
extremely thrilling thriller is called Midnight Black. Go buy it,
go read it again. You don't have to read previous
gray Man books to enjoy it, although you will probably
(13:39):
go buy and read previous gray Man books after you
do read this one. Mark, thanks for everything. Has always
hope to see you soon.
Speaker 3 (13:46):
I appreciate it. Roll, thank you.
Speaker 2 (13:47):
Okay, see yall,
People hear me talk about thriller novels a lot, and
listeners will email me, email me, or text me or
meet me somewhere and say, you know what, what should
I read? And and and I always I always tell
him I I think the most thrilling thrillers are by
Mark Grainey, his gray Man series, although he does other
(00:21):
stuff too that's also great. The gray Man series what
he's best known for, and he's got a new one
out it's called Midnight Black. I have read the entire thing,
of course, as I do with all of all of
Mark's books.
Speaker 2 (00:34):
And he joins us again on the show.
Speaker 1 (00:36):
Mark, very very good to see you here, Thanks for
thanks for joining you.
Speaker 3 (00:40):
Bet Ross good to be here.
Speaker 1 (00:42):
So a couple of things I want to talk about
regarding this book.
Speaker 2 (00:45):
It is it is thinly veiled.
Speaker 1 (00:49):
Would just makes the veil sound thicker than it is,
a thinly veiled conversation about Navalney and his wife and Putin,
and in a sense, one of the things.
Speaker 2 (01:02):
I really liked so much about this story.
Speaker 1 (01:04):
I don't know if you know this, but I studied
Soviet politics in college and I'm very interested in all
this stuff. Although it was way before putin in a sense,
your story. It's a thriller, but it's kind of aspirational
for something that could happen to Russia.
Speaker 3 (01:20):
Yeah, that's a really good way of putting it.
Speaker 4 (01:21):
This is my twenty six published novel, and in the
first twenty five books I wrote, I was always thinking
about trying to hit the geopolitics directly on the head
for the day the book comes out.
Speaker 3 (01:32):
You start writing these a year and a half or
a year before.
Speaker 4 (01:34):
They come out, and I'm always trying to hit it
exactly the way I think is going to be.
Speaker 3 (01:38):
But for this book, I told myself I.
Speaker 4 (01:40):
Wanted to be more hopeful than I expected to find
the world when it comes out.
Speaker 3 (01:45):
My character, who is basically based on Alexi.
Speaker 4 (01:48):
Navalni, is named Nathan Yarrovoy, and he's still alive. He's
being worked to death in a prison.
Speaker 3 (01:54):
He doesn't have.
Speaker 4 (01:55):
Long to live, but he is still alive. His wife
is in prison as well. But also in other ways,
I wanted the story to be more hopeful. There's a
Russian resistance that's in this story and that that actually
exists in Russia, but I just.
Speaker 3 (02:08):
Made it more organized and more.
Speaker 4 (02:10):
Sort of ideologically pure and there's a few things I
did where I said, all right, I'm going to understand
the real world, but I'm going to tweak it a
little bit to make this a great story.
Speaker 1 (02:20):
Yeah, you know, at the at the end of the
last book, you knew that court Gentry the gray Man
was going to have to do something to rescue his
the love of his life was a Rozoya who's a Russian.
Speaker 2 (02:36):
But you know much more than than that.
Speaker 1 (02:39):
And I'm curious whether at the when you were finishing
the last book, did you already have an idea that
this book was going to have a plot like this.
And I don't mean just rescuing her, but the other
stuff now.
Speaker 3 (02:55):
Just the most general stuff. You know.
Speaker 4 (02:57):
I remember when I finished the last book, going, well,
this is great. I know what the next book's going
to be about. But you know, that little one sentence
the hero goes to Russia to rescue and the woman
he loves. That doesn't get you through one hundred and
fifty thousand words. And as I started writing it, I
was like, Okay, you know, in the real world, the
enemy gets a vote. You know, what is the enemy
(03:19):
doing here? And what twists and turns can we throw
in here to where people don't just say, oh, he's
going to go in there and he's going to fight
some people and he's going to get the girl and
then he's going.
Speaker 3 (03:27):
To get out of there. This book has got so
much more to it than that.
Speaker 4 (03:32):
And so I started thinking about the Cold War, and
I studied that stuff back then as well, and I
just wrote this book as if it was a Cold
War era novel about the Soviet Union. Even though it's Russia,
it's such a police state and the cleptocracy and the
corruption and the Kremlin, the militancy of what's going on,
(03:53):
it's all very similar to what was happening in the eighties,
and I wanted to tell that type of his story.
Speaker 3 (03:57):
So that's what.
Speaker 4 (03:58):
Grew out of, out of that initial one sentence of
going to Russia.
Speaker 1 (04:03):
Yeah, and you know, for listeners, again, the book is
called Midnight Black, and you know, we mentioned that it
includes a hint of a love story. But I mean
you're talking about stuff here involving spies on both sides,
military Americans, Russians, Ukrainians. It's just it's a very dynamic story.
I mean, all of all of the Gray Men books are,
(04:23):
but this is a really dynamic story. And I'll tell you, Mark,
this is a funny thing every every once in a
while when I'm reading fiction, especially fiction by really good writers,
where there's more than a kernel of truth to it,
there's a lot of real stuff going on there. And
I put you and Jack and Brad thor you know,
(04:45):
into that category. And I've I've studied a lot about Russia.
So I'm reading, I'm reading the book. I'm reading the book,
and I'll just I'll just read a little here. Three
hundred miles southeast of Moscow, the Republic of Mordovia sits
in the Volga River basin, a land of rolling plains,
thick forests, and backbreaking industry. Fifteen prisons got the settlements
(05:07):
and forests of the district of Zubovo Polansky on the
western side of the state, and fifteen prisons together are
referred to by the Russian government as a penal fiefdom.
Speaker 2 (05:18):
So when I first.
Speaker 1 (05:19):
Read that, Mark, I thought, that is some fabulous artistic
license by Mark Brainey to make up some new place
in Russia. And then I went and looked it up
and the place is freaking real.
Speaker 4 (05:30):
Yeah, yeah, So you know, in the nineteen thirties, Joseph
Stalin created the gulog system, and there's still like in
Russia today, there's seven hundred and something federal penitentiaries of
one style or another. And so there is a place
in Mordovia in Russia called Yk two Javis, which is
a women's correctional colony where there's hard labor and women
(05:54):
are put there. And so I did all the research
that I could. Some of the research I did on
the gulag system. They don't call them gulogs anymore, but
they're the same buildings and the same fences in the
same barbed wire, I guess, And I did, you know,
a lot of the research I did was reading older
books about Soviet era prison time, because there's not a
whole lot of contemporary stuff. There's news about it in
(06:17):
some videos and things, but a lot of it was
reading the old stuff. But yeah, that aspect of the
story is all sadly, very real and very stark and shocking.
Speaker 2 (06:27):
I guess you read some soul John Eatson.
Speaker 3 (06:31):
Yeah, oh yeah, I read Gulog Archipelago. Yeah, you have
to do things I read research one.
Speaker 2 (06:36):
You'd have to. So I'm curious how warm and welcoming.
Speaker 1 (06:41):
Were they to you when you went for a tour
at Yavas and asked them about the place?
Speaker 3 (06:48):
Yeah, so the.
Speaker 4 (06:49):
State Department has a complete do not travel advisory into Russia. Now,
if you went, and it's not because I'm anything special,
any of us who went, any of your listeners who
would go there would probably be picked up and hell
to be traded back for someone in the West. But
you might be sitting in a cell for a couple
of years before that happens. Fortunately, I have been to Russia,
(07:09):
and I went to Russia when I was working on
a book with Tom Clancy before he passed away, and
so I have all my videos and there are scenes
in this book that are in Gorky Park, in the
Moscow subway stations and things like that, and places that
I've actually been in videos that I was able to
refer to and notes that I had to make it real.
(07:30):
I have never been to a Russian penal colony, and.
Speaker 3 (07:34):
I hope to keep it that way.
Speaker 4 (07:36):
Yeah, you know, that's where the artistic license came in.
Speaker 1 (07:39):
We're talking with Mark Greeney about his fantastic new gray
Man novel called Midnight Black. You should definitely go buy
it and read it. And you you don't need to
have read previous gray Man books to love this book.
Speaker 2 (07:54):
You don't need to go buy them and read them all.
Speaker 1 (07:56):
You probably should, but you don't need to enjoy this book.
Speaker 3 (08:00):
Now.
Speaker 1 (08:02):
Part of what happens in the book is that Court
Gentry needs to get into Russia and try to connect
with the Russian resistance to save his girlfriend or whatever
you want to call Zoya.
Speaker 2 (08:15):
And as part of that process, he meets with the.
Speaker 1 (08:20):
Father of someone he's trying to connect with. And I'm
gonna read again from the book. So this is an
old Russian man speaking in the book. He said, I
pray that someday the suffering will end. But I don't
worry about myself or my wife we've lived. I care
about the younger generations. With a shrug, he said, my generation,
(08:43):
the generation after mine, we've had our chance to make
this nation a better place. He looked up at Court
and the American could hear the pain in the old
man's words, and here we are. That really that really
struck me as well. And I'm wondering whether that sense
of you know how much we've failed future generations in
(09:05):
the mind of older Russians. Is that a creation of
your imagination what you hope they think, or did you
talk to some old Russians and get that kind of perspective?
Speaker 3 (09:17):
You know, I didn't.
Speaker 4 (09:18):
I didn't talk to anyone that that relayed that. I
looked at what resistance exists in Russian now, and I
tried to make it more helpful than than it really was.
Speaker 3 (09:31):
A lot of the resistance groups.
Speaker 4 (09:33):
I could have used actual names of resistance groups, but
some of them are kind of ideologically not that pure.
I let's say they're they're very much anti Putin, but
they're also anti Semites or whatever. So I didn't use
anyone directly. But you know, I just have this sense that,
you know, all these people that work so hard in
the eighties to help the Soviet Union fall, and there
(09:56):
was a lot of resistance in the former public than
in Russia itself. They you know, in the nineties, everything
just went to hell there in a different way, and
then Putin took power really in ninety nine to two
thousand and for a quarter century, he's managed to hold
onto power, and he will hold on a power until
(10:16):
he dies. And so there just has to be this
belief of these people that gave their lives to make
their country a better place that you know there was.
There was ten years there where they didn't have a
complete autocrat and power, but who they had in power
were drunk and corrupt.
Speaker 3 (10:33):
And it's really really.
Speaker 4 (10:35):
Sad because I know there's lots of great Russians, and
there are Russians fighting on the side of the Ukrainians
and battalions in Ukraine.
Speaker 3 (10:41):
So these people exist.
Speaker 4 (10:43):
I just I think I just sort of expanded on
them a little bit for the boat.
Speaker 2 (10:50):
One more question for you.
Speaker 1 (10:51):
The Russian spy who sort of manipulated the Gray Man
into coming into Russia, which itself is just a fabulous
thread throughout this book. Is he based on someone in particular,
or based on a story in particular, or is that
you know from your imagination.
Speaker 3 (11:13):
Well, it's mostly fiction.
Speaker 4 (11:15):
So the FSB which is Russian domestic intelligence, and the
GRU is Russian military intelligence, and the SBR is Russian
foreign intelligence. Although it all gets very very muddied, especially
when you're talking about the former Soviet republics, because you
would think they're foreign countries. Now they're not part of Russia,
but Russia uses their domestic intelligence agencies in those countries.
(11:36):
They call it the near abroad, which is kind of
their way of saying, we're going to hold onto these
areas and as far as we're concerned, they're still domestic.
But these three intelligence agencies are at war with each
other in Russia, all sorts of backstamping and things like that,
and I really wanted to play up on that. So
I created this character Baranov, who's this FSB colonel and
(11:57):
he doesn't trust the GRU and he has dealings with
them in this he doesn't trust the SVR, which is Zoya,
the woman who he's who is in prison there that
of course trying to get. She's former SVR. So there's
just I want to just add a lot of intrigue
to this story. So it just wasn't a straight up
war book or a straight up you know, uh, just
(12:18):
a John Wick story. I wanted it to have some
other layers to it, and I thought barring off would.
Speaker 3 (12:23):
Be a good way to do that.
Speaker 1 (12:24):
And I'll just tell folks who are who are listening,
you know, we've we've talked about Midnight Black a lot
from the kind of historical and intellectual and spy story side,
but a significant percentage of this book is also action
and you know, raids and paramilitary scenes and all and
and fighting.
Speaker 2 (12:45):
And so it's it's a great balance.
Speaker 1 (12:46):
It's exactly what you want from a thriller, which is
always always what you get from Mark Greeney.
Speaker 2 (12:53):
How far are you into the next book?
Speaker 3 (12:56):
Not far enough? I'm you know, I'm plugging away. It'll
be due this.
Speaker 4 (13:01):
Summer and I'm going to go to Northern Ireland and
do some research there for that book, that book fifteen,
which is the one I'm working on now, and it'll
be out. They always come out in February, so it'll
be out.
Speaker 3 (13:12):
I'll get it done.
Speaker 4 (13:13):
But I wish I was a little further along than
I am, but that's where I am every year.
Speaker 1 (13:16):
Now, well, let's I'd love to work with you and
your people to host an event for you for the
book tour for that one, if we can, if we
can make it happen, I think that would be just
great to have you here in Denver. Mark Grainy's new
extremely thrilling thriller is called Midnight Black. Go buy it,
go read it again. You don't have to read previous
gray Man books to enjoy it, although you will probably
(13:39):
go buy and read previous gray Man books after you
do read this one. Mark, thanks for everything. Has always
hope to see you soon.
Speaker 3 (13:46):
I appreciate it. Roll, thank you.
Speaker 2 (13:47):
Okay, see yall,
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