Guns, money, and dangerous secrets come together in Anonymous Male, retired sniper Christopher Whitcomb's fever dream of a memoir of his life after resigning from the FBI's Hostage Rescue Team in 2001.
After publishing Cold Zero, an account of his high-octane experiences within the Bureau, Whitcomb appeared frequently in a wide variety of media outlets as a commentator and journalist specializing in his analysis of terror. He then used his press contacts to access remote areas of Pakistan, gleaning information for the CIA. From there, Whitcomb drove himself even deeper into increasingly dangerous situations, including a hair-raising stop in Somalia and a trip to Timor-Leste, a conflict-riven island in Southeast Asia, where he assembled a private army to provide security for a new government. After surviving a coup attempt, Whitcomb found himself disconnected from his family, his life, and his entire belief system. It wasn't until he nearly drowned while surfing off the coast of Bali that Whitcomb realized his true self had become buried under layers of deception, and he finally returned home to the U.S.
Whitcomb's writing style is at once tangential, aggressive, and hazy, as if he is watching and reexperiencing pasted-together clips of the action film of his life. As entertaining as his adrenaline-fueled adventures are to read, one senses that an existence spent at either end of a loaded gun takes a toll on the psyche and that, eventually, there will be a reckoning. Whitcomb, however, leaves it to readers to draw these conclusions. His goal, at which he succeeds with Anonymous Male, is to deliver one wild ride. --Debra Ginsberg, author and freelance editor