Jack Carr’s latest thriller, Red Sky Mourning, should come with a reader’s advisory, a blood red rectangle in bold print — “people with a heart condition should proceed at their own risk. Timid soy-boys need venture no further.” If you’ve never been shot at before, you’ll feel the experience deep within your quivering viscera. Reading Red Sky Mourning, you’ll forget you’re snug at home wearing your favorite pair of slippers, and sweat nervously as you prepare for a HALO jump out of a small, purpose built cargo door just under screaming turbines sucking, crushing, and blasting a column of superheated air into the stratospheric void.

Your destination isn’t a placid field of gently growing Kentucky fescue, but the heaving swells of the Banda Sea. The only easy day was yesterday.

Carr puts you on a CIA covert jet with James Reece, flying nearly twice as high as Mount Everest. The modified civilian sport rig’s straps will pinch your flesh as your jump buddy meticulously checks rings and pins — each critical to you surviving the next twenty minutes of arctic free fall. Never collided with a brick wall? If you read Carr’s latest, you’ll experience a virtual concussion as your frigid fingertips grip the freezer cold aluminum skin of the sucking black hole before you. All you have to do next is jump, tuck into a ball, and survive the freight train of atmosphere turned to solid mass through sheer velocity.

After the pneumatic beating, you can untuck,........

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