Dark Justice

Dark Justice is a thriller by Jack Higgins, published in 2004 and one of the novels featuring Sean Dillon, an intelligence operator with a past on the other side of the conflict in Northern Ireland.

An attempt on the life of the American president is stopped before the trigger can be pulled, which leaves the security services with a prisoner and no explanation for the plot. Sean Dillon and Blake Johnson, who work the operations that cannot be acknowledged in public, are given the job of finding out who ordered the attack and why anyone would spend so much to arrange it. Their investigation puts them into a contest with an enemy who does not play by the usual rules, and the novel sets Dillon's willingness to act outside the law against an opponent who holds exactly the same view of how the world works.

Higgins writes fast thrillers of old loyalties and sudden violence, and this belongs to the later stage of a long series in which the same small team is handed each new crisis as it arrives.