Executive power

Executive Power is a thriller by the American writer Vince Flynn, published in 2003 and the sixth of his novels about Mitch Rapp.

After an operation in Iraq, Rapp can no longer work covertly, and his new job puts him in the director's office rather than in the field, which he resents. A Navy SEAL team sent to recover an American family held hostage in the Philippines is ambushed and two of its members are killed, and the investigation shows that the details of the operation were emailed by an official who should never have had them. Rapp's answer is to remove the reason for the leak and to go after the people holding the family, and the book follows the argument inside Washington and the operation abroad. Flynn writes the politics as a set of competing institutions, and his hero as the person willing to do what the institutions cannot.

It followed Separation of Power in the series, and the same cast of characters returns in the books after it.