Dewey Andreas Will Punch You In The Face, Repeatedly

An Ex-Delta Guy Walks Into a Pipeline Explosion

Dewey Andreas starts, in Power Down, as a guy who is trying very hard not to be a killing machine anymore. He’s working construction on an Alaskan pipeline, which is Ben Coes’ way of telling you: this man used to be Delta Force and now he installs pipe fittings and that is somehow supposed to be a downgrade in danger level. Naturally the pipeline gets attacked by terrorists, his fiancee gets taken hostage, and Dewey has approximately one page and a half of grief before he’s back to doing the thing his body apparently never forgot how to do.

That’s the engine of the whole series, book after book. Dewey tries to have a normal life. The universe will not allow it. Somebody kidnaps someone he loves, or the CIA drags him back in, or a nuclear device goes missing and only a man who has personally strangled seventeen people with his bare hands (I’m estimating, but it’s in that neighborhood) can find it in time. I want to be annoyed at how repetitive that setup is. I mostly am not, and I need to sit with why.

The Good, the Dumb, and the Genuinely Great Set Piece in Book Three

Here’s the thing. Coes writes action like he’s actually done the math on it. There’s a scene, I want to say it’s in The Last Refuge, where Dewey has to take out a security detail in a moving vehicle using basically nothing but timing and physics, and it reads like a stunt coordinator wrote it, not a novelist. Tight, mechanical, satisfying in the way watching someone solve a Rubik’s cube fast is satisfying. When Coes is locked in on a set piece, he’s better at pure kinetic thriller writing than half the names on the bestseller table.

What genuinely doesn’t work: the women. I’ll just say it. Dewey’s love interests exist to be kidnapped, threatened, or mourned, and Coes has not, across a decade of books, figured out how to give any of them an interior life that survives more than a chapter. Jessica in the early books gets set up like she might be a real character and then the plot needs a hostage and guess who. I found myself skimming those chapters by book four, which is not a good sign for a series I otherwise enjoy.

The politics are also stuck in a very specific 2011 brain, all shadowy Pakistani intelligence officers and vaguely evil Russians, the kind of geopolitics that reads less like insight and more like a Call of Duty campaign’s understanding of the world. I don’t need my airport thriller to have a nuanced foreign policy stance, but there are moments where it edges from pulpy fun into something a little uncomfortable, and I’d be lying if I said it never made me wince.

A tangent, since I’m being honest: I went through a phase around 2019 where I read three of these back to back on a single cross country drive as audiobooks, and somewhere around Oklahoma I started to genuinely worry about what it said about me that I was cheering during a torture scene. That’s not a knock on the book exactly. That’s just what this genre does to you if you mainline it. Dewey Andreas is a controlled substance and I’m not always proud of my dosage.

Is it a mess sometimes? Yes. Plots get convoluted in the middle books, side characters pile up faster than you can track them, and Coes occasionally forgets he already used a “one man against an impossible deadline” structure two books ago. But the propulsion never quits. I have never once put a Dewey Andreas book down for more than a day. That has to count for something, even if I can’t always tell you if it’s counting for good reasons.

Dewey Andreas doesn’t have a personality so much as a threat level, and somehow that’s the whole appeal.

About Ben Coes

Ben Coes isn’t some retired operator cashing in on war stories, which surprised me when I looked it up. He’s a former speechwriter, worked in Massachusetts politics, and came to thrillers sideways through a career in words rather than warzones. That actually tracks once you notice it. The dialogue in these books is snappier and more calculated than most military thrillers manage, like someone who spent years making politicians sound decisive is now applying that same skill to a guy garroting a mercenary in a Karachi stairwell. He clearly did his homework on the military and intelligence details too. It shows in the hardware, the procedure, the way missions actually get planned, even when the emotional beats feel phoned in.

If You Burned Through This, Read These Next

Vince Flynn’s Mitch Rapp series, for the same relentless one-man-army energy but with slightly better plotting discipline. Brad Thor’s Scot Harvath books if you want the geopolitics turned up even louder. And if you want something that questions the genre while still delivering the goods, Barry Eisler’s John Rain novels have more soul and a lot more self-awareness about what this kind of violence costs a person.

For your book club

1. Does Dewey Andreas ever actually change across the books, or is he the same weapon in different settings?
2. Is the series’ treatment of its female characters a genre convention worth forgiving, or a real flaw worth calling out?
3. What does it say about us that we root for a man doing objectively horrific things to people coded as villains?
4. Which book’s central threat felt the most plausible, and which felt the most like an action movie pitch?
5. Would this series work as well without the constant personal stakes (kidnapped loved ones), or is that crutch necessary to keep Dewey emotionally legible?