‘The Last Run’ picks up pace after slow start

If you were a spy agency, what would you do if you had a high-ranking Iranian government official who wanted to defect to the West from Iran?

There are few good options, and that’s the conundrum British spy Tara Chace and her team confronts in “The Last Run,” Greg Rucka’s new novel in his best-selling “Queen & Country” series.

Rucka created Chace, a smart and sexy spy, for a graphic novel series and later wrote novel adaptations of the series. “The Last Run” is the third installment, and it may be the last, or so it appears.

Chace is in her mid-30s and is contemplating retiring after more than a decade of getting beat up in the field as Britain’s top covert agent. She wants to train a new generation of special ops officers and have a more normal lifestyle.

But alas, there’s one last mission and it may be her most dangerous: the aforementioned Iranian case. After getting a coded message from the alleged defector and deciding the potential benefits outweigh the risks, she and a small extraction team get into the country to find him and get him out ASAP.

But as in most thrillers, the task is easier said than done. After a deadly shootout, Chace’s cover has been compromised and she is forced to go on the run — by herself — to elude the Iranians and make it safely back home. Extracting the defector, if they can find him, has apparently failed.

“Everything had gone wrong,” Rucka writes. “(Chace) was alone in a police state, her cover blown … but the worst of it was, she knew now that she’d been shot.”

Chace steals a vehicle, breaks into a pharmacy to get meds and flees to the rural Alborz mountains, trying to avoid the police. She needs medical assistance soon, and she doesn’t know if the rest of her team is alive and/or arrested.

These are the most exciting chapters of the book, as Rucka flips back and forth between her predicament, the Iranians’ hunt and the home base back in London, where they know the mission has failed and realize Chace may be dead.

“The Last Run” starts off slow but picks up speed once Chace and the team enter Iran. It's fast-paced, entertaining and has some satisfying twists and turns. Let’s hope “The Last Run” isn’t really Chace’s last run.