AMERICA’S EXCITINGEST POP-FICTION WRITER?

On April 1, 2021, journalist Derek Thompson published an essay in the Atlantic arguing that novelist and former New York Times reporter Alex Berenson was “The Pandemic’s Wrongest Man.” It was not an April Fools Day joke. Thompson truly believed that, of all the people who had spouted misinformation about the pandemic over the previous year or so, Berenson was the worst, his lies/errors the most egregious. And he made a strong argument on behalf of this belief. Berenson, for instance, was a vaccine skeptic who argued that, in country after country, “cases rise after vaccination campaigns begin,” when, in fact, just the opposite was happening. Thompson concluded his piece with this statement: “The case against the vaccines wobbles because it is built upon a pile of steaming bullshit.”

Of course, over the last four years or so, we’ve learned that a lot of the “expert” commentary on COVID-19 was wobbly, at best. For instance, the so-called “lab leak theory,” which was widely mocked by mainstream journalists back in 2020 and 2021 has since gained a lot of adherents, even among the mainstream scientific and journalistic communities (though the jury is still out on whether it is true or not). And liberal publications were no less inclined to make stupid pandemic decisions than were conservative ones. In the midst of the pandemic, The New York Times fired one of its top science reporters, Donald McNeil, over untrue accusations that he was guilty of an act of racism.

I am not qualified to make any serious scientific observations about the COVID-19 pandemic. I am not a scientist and haven’t done much reading on the topic. I cannot say whether or not Alex Berenson was the pandemic’s wrongest man. If you are interested, you could read his 2021 book, Pandemia: How Coronavirus Hysteria Took Over Our Government, Rights, and Lives, and see how well it holds up four years later. I suspect your verdict will be highly colored by your pre-existing political views. Personally, I recommend that you skip Berenson’s nonfiction and focus instead on his novels.

Even prior to the fame/notoriety he attracted during the pandemic, I was aware that Alex Berenson was a highly-regarded author of espionage thrillers. Alas, I had never bothered to read any of these thrillers because they were all part of a series, the so-called “John Wells series,” which currently comprises twelve novels. I am not completely averse to pop-fiction series but, generally, I prefer standalone thrillers. When The Power Couple, Berenson’s first standalone thriller, was published in 2021, I thought of giving it a go. Alas, less than two months later, Derek Thompson’s attack on Berenson appeared in the Atlantic and, as a result, I foolishly allowed it to persuade me that Berenson was a nutjob and likely not capable of writing an intelligent thriller. That was a big mistake.

In January of this year, I finally got around to purchasing a copy of The Power Couple and I began reading it immediately. The novel has a great opening hook. The power couple of the title are Rebecca and Brian Unsworth. She is one of the FBI’s top counter-intelligence agents. He is a computer specialist at the NSA. They have been married for twenty years, have two children – 19-year-old Kate and 15-year-old Tony – and appear to be living the American dream. As the story opens, the Unsworth family is in Barcelona on vacation. But the vacation quickly becomes a nightmare when Kate is abducted for unknown reasons by two young people she encounters at a Barcelona nightclub. They drug her and haul her away to some secret location. When Kate doesn’t return to the family’s hotel room at a reasonable hour, Rebecca begins to suspect the worst. Almost immediately, she contacts the local police, but they largely dismiss her concerns, believing that a pretty young American girl who spends a night partying in Barcelona’s nightclub district is almost certain to end up drinking too much and is probably sleeping off a hangover in the bed of some local Lothario. Give it a few hours, the cops tell, Rebecca. She’ll be home soon, you’ll see. But Rebecca doesn’t believe them. As a counter-intelligence specialist she has helped do a lot of damage to Russia’s intelligence networks in the United States. She believes that Kate might have been abducted to retaliate against Rebecca for her FBI work. In this way, the book bears some resemblance to the 2008 film Taken, in which Liam Neeson portrays an ex-CIA operative trying to find his kidnapped daughter. The film contains one of the most recognizable movie quotes of the twenty-first century, delivered by Neeson’s character:

“I don’t know who you are. I don’t know what you want. If you are looking for ransom I can tell you I don’t have money, but what I do have are a very particular set of skills. Skills I have acquired over a very long career. Skills that make me a nightmare for people like you. If you let my daughter go now that’ll be the end of it. I will not look for you, I will not pursue you, but if you don’t, I will look for you, I will find you and I will kill you.”

That speech could very well have been delivered by Rebecca Unsworth to Kate’s abductors, and it would have been largely true. Rebecca possesses not just a wealth of crime-fighting skills, but also complete access to the entire crime-fighting machinery of the FBI. And, through the FBI, she also has easy access to Interpol and other European police agencies. Most importantly, through the FBI, she has a direct connection to the Mossos d’Esquadra, the primary police force of Spain’s independent Catalonia district, the organization most likely to have information on Kate’s abductors. What’s more, Brian Unsworth works for NSA, which means he has access to that agency’s computers and facial-recognition software and phone-hacking technologies and a lot of other high-tech gadgetry that can be used to identify Kate’s abductors. Thus, the abductors in The Power Couple have to contend with not one Liam Neeson but two (actually, more like one-and-a-half Neesons, because Brian is nowhere near the badass that Rebecca is, at least not in the novel’s early sections). Eventually, Kate herself will begin to channel her inner Liam Neeson and then we are dealing with Taken-times-three.

Alas, this thrilling opening section lasts for only 73 pages. After that, Berenson goes back twenty years and gives us a big dose (75 pages, or so) of Rebecca’s back-story. I started reading this section but quickly became annoyed with Berenson’s choice, and I put the book aside, not sure that I would ever return to it. That was in January. I read probably a dozen more novels over the next few months but, for some reason, I couldn’t quite put Kate Unsworth and her predicament out of my mind. Thus, a week or so ago, I finally returned to The Power Couple, determined to finish it.

In the section about Rebecca’s back-story, we learn about her first meeting with Brian, their courtship and the rocky early years of their marriage. We learn about the births of their children. And we follow Rebecca’s FBI career as she moves from field offices in Atlanta and Houston to her eventual dream job in the Bureau’s Washington, D.C., headquarters. Now, instead of putting away crooked Atlanta automobile dealers, she is chasing Russian spies – the stuff of Hollywood movies. The only major disappointment in her life is Brian. After the kids are born, he seems satisfied to be a stay-at-home-dad. Never very ambitious to begin with, he now spends much of his time playing video games and dreaming of inventing a billion-dollar computer app. He seems allergic to seeking paying work. In Atlanta, Rebecca helps him find a job as an IT specialist at a local college. In Houston, she uses her connections to get him a low-level job at Conoco-Phillips, a multinational energy company. In D.C., a high-powered town, Brian’s lack of a college degree and his general underachiever vibe seem likely to doom him to perpetual unemployment. But, via her FBI connections, Rebecca manages to secure him a low-level job at NSA. And, as it turns out, despite Brian’s disdain for those who work for “the Man” – i.e., any kind of establishment position – he turns out to be pretty successful at NSA. What’s more, he finally manages to invent an online gambling app and sell it to an internet corporation for two million dollars. Things appear to be looking up for the Unsworths!

All this leads us to page 155 where we finally return to present-day Barcelona and the kidnapping of Kate Unsworth. This section is just as thrilling and fast moving as the opening section. Alas, it comes to an abrupt halt at page 215, after which we once again travel back in time and get…another recap of the courtship and marriage of Brian and Rebecca! Once again, I found myself pissed off at Berenson. Didn’t we just cover this material? Well, we did cover it, but the first large section of back-story was told entirely from Rebecca’s point of view. The second section is from Brian’s point of view. And, in this case, point of view makes all the difference in the world. Brian’s view of his marriage and his career and his wife and children is very different from Rebecca’s. And a lot of the “facts” revealed during Rebecca’s flashback section turn out not to be so factual. And, believe it or not, the discrepancies between their two back-stories will have an enormous impact on Kate’s safety as the authorities struggle to find out who took her and where she is being held. The Power Couple is a lot like the hit Netflix TV series The Diplomat, in which a wife (Kerri Russell) and husband (Rufus Sewell), both of them American foreign policy experts, act as an object lesson in how the personal and the professional merge into one for many power couples. The danger that Kate Unsworth faces does indeed stem from her parents’ professional connections, but any chance she has of survival also largely depends upon their professional connections.

Brian’s back-story section is more thrilling than Rebecca’s. And it is followed by a return to Barcelona in the present day, where the kidnapping drama – though not the novel itself – is reaching its final act.

My description of the novel contains a few spoilers, but not as many as you might think. This is a book that keeps surprising you until literally the final page. Despite the frequent backtracking, this is an amazingly compelling and intelligent thriller that, once I accepted Berenson’s storytelling method, kept me turning pages like a madman. This is probably the best thriller I’ve read so far in 2025.

I have no idea if Alex Berenson was, indeed, the pandemic’s wrongest man. But, he is, as far as I’m concerned, one of contemporary America’s excitingest pop-fiction writers.