“The difference between fiction and reality,” laughs Brad Thor, paraphrasing Mark Twain, “is that people expect fiction to make sense.” The author of 18 political espionage thrillers, most recently this summer’s Use of Force, Thor has toed that line carefully for years—but now, he says, when plotlines including Russian election intervention dominate the news cycle, the real-world fodder for his novels have grown much richer.
With at least one book a year since 2001, Thor has emerged as a kind of Tom Clancy of the post-9/11 era, and a favorite novelist of conservatives, merging a dark realist worldview with action and never letting the reader forget there really are bad guys out to get us…