Sheepdogs

There's a new Maverick hero on the block . . . fun and pacy . . . thrilling

Simon Ings, Daily Telegraph

An unorthodox and highly contemporary spy thriller, set in the shadowlands between legal and illegal military action . . . a black comedy with deadly serious undertones

Mail on Sunday

A rollicking military-adjacent adventure . . . replete with jet-setting paramilitary types, secret meetings at the highest level of government and firefights, with some rough sex and women in peril added for good measure. But if the novel has its fair share of tropes, Ackerman is also determined to unravel a few of them, to expose how corrupting a world full of crumbling democracies can be . . . Sheepdogs thrives in exposing the moral uncertainty of this new world order

Mark Athitakis, Washington Post

Akerman has been reflective, elegiac, often ruefully nostalgic, at times quietly angry, always sternly principled, and analytical to the point of prophetic . . . Sheepdogs is a gear shift into deceptively rip-roaring caper mode

Celia McGee, New York Times

Lean but globe-trotting, it’s both funny and deadly earnest. Where lots of military thrillers lean on gruff brutality, this instead lends something like the castoff perspective of Slow Horses to the chaotic pessimism of David O Russell’s film, Three Kings

Brian Cliff & Elizabeth Mannion, Irish Times

A black-ops comedy of errors

Mark Yost, Wall Street Journal

A plane heist goes outrageously awry . . . lively . . . moving . . . Though his tone is light, Ackerman regularly reminds the reader of the lifelong shadow war casts on the men who fight

Rav Grewal-Kök, New York Times

Skwerl, Cheese, Dickhead Mike, the White Russian—these characters are totally addictive. I couldn’t put Sheepdogs down. A thriller and comedy in one, it’s a wild ride

Harlan Coben, author of Nobody's Fool

Sheepdogs is the best thriller I’ve read in a long, long time. With a perfect blend of action and humor, I was hooked from the first page and couldn’t put it down until I’d finished. Here’s hoping this isn’t the last we’ll hear of Skwerl, Cheese and the rest of Ackerman’s unforgettable band of misfits. It’s an absolute gem of a novel

Kevin Powers, author of The Yellow Birds