2.5 stars.
What a great concept this book has... And that's all it has going for it. Character development... Terrible... We are still meeting characters as the book is winding down, not a way to make the reader care what happens to said character. The chapters... So disjointed... Some start in one city from the pov of one character and stay that way. Some just from city to city or even to different countries, while also jumping character povs. Didn't make much sense. Plot timeline... Horrendous... Pages and pages were wasted on insignificant details while large plot points felt like they were thrown in after the fact.
The more I think about it, this book didn't have to many redeeming qualities. Beamon was an ok character, who was supposed to be, according to the back cover, a maverick. If mouthing off to your boss once makes you a maverick I'd love to see what the author would call some of the people I work with. And going back to my original point about character development, I wanted to like Beamon more, but he wasn't developed properly and I never really connected... He's no John Corey, haha.
Anyway, the only thing that saved this book was the original concept of the story and how it played out... That is all.

Edit: after writing my review I dropped this book back to two stars. ( )

I don't know why I haven't found this author before now but I am sure glad I have now. Wow. A rogue former DEA agent has a great idea for winning the war on drugs - poison the supply and scare everybody straight. He has a multi-millionaire religious evangelist as a backer and he's on his way. Thousands start dropping dead. This is a marvelously crafted plot, carried along by amazingly readable writing and really interesting characters. ( )

I see that this is a 5 book series starring Mark Beamon as the main character. But this is not how he is presented in the novel. He's almost a minor character, and does not have much development... he's just there because there has to be a "good guy" to solve the crime, but the book isn't about him any more than it's about the main bad guy, and the war on drugs.

I can't even say that the point was to introduce us to Beamon's way of doing things because he didn't really do anything in the story - it was only solved because of snitches/anonymous tipsters who ratted out the bad guys.

That being said, the story itself was interesting (would this approach really work better than the current war on drugs?) and violent and fast-paced...

I'll probably read more books starring Beamon, though not so much for Beamon as for the interesting storyline. ( )

Another cool guy in an incredible thriller ( )

It is clear that the author has a lot of sympathy for his villains in this book. Probably the first 100 pages are devoted solely to the criminal and how his operation is being set up. It's a bit tedious and violent, and I really only skimmed through those pages. But after that the pace picks up a bit, and the process of actually tracking down the bad guy works out pretty well. The main FBI agent is a bit cardboardish but I did like the female lead, and the portrayals of the Colombian drug dealers were pretty much on the money. I also liked the complexity of the right-wing Christian leader who kicks off the whole thing. I might read another one if I see it around. ( )