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Here’s some big news to break in the new year . . .
#1 New York Times bestselling author Jack Carr, who sits at the very top of the thriller genre today and is best known for his James Reece The Terminal List franchise—which Carr expanded in 2025 with Cry Havoc, a prequel story set against the backdrop of the Vietnam War following James’ father, Tom Reece—is set to release his first book outside of Reece’s universe with The Fourth Option, available on May 12th, 2026.
Carr, who currently has two television shows (The Terminal List and The Terminal List: Dark Wolf, both starring Chris Pratt and Taylor Kitsch) atop Amazon’s Prime Video charts, and somehow manages to balance being on set with his heavy writing and media schedule, has teamed up with fellow New York Times bestselling author M.P. Woodward to bring readers his latest action-packed thrill ride.
Woodward, a talented writer in his own right who’s also a veteran of both US intelligence ops and the entertainment industry, first entered the thriller scene in 2022 with his debut novel, The Handler, before taking over the Jack Ryan Junior series for the Tom Clancy estate the following year. Since then, he’s gone on to pen three Junior books, but moving forward, will slide over to the Jack Senior titles, effectively replacing Andrews & Wilson, who stepped down in 2025.
Bottom line: It’s hard to imagine a better writing duo than Jack Carr (the biggest draw in the thriller genre right now) and M.P. Woodward teaming up to bring the action to kickoff a new series in 2026.
Asked how the book came to be, Carr, speaking exclusively to The Real Book Spy, explained, “The idea for The Fourth Option has been simmering for years. It was one of the concepts I wanted to explore when I first spread all my executive summaries out on a table in 2014, studying them to decide which would become my first novel as I was getting ready to leave the SEAL Teams. I decided on The Terminal List, but The Fourth Option would not leave me. I started the treatment with these words: “When law enforcement, the courts, and the prison system fail…there is a fourth and final option.”
“I thought of The Fourth Option as a modern tribute to the 1950s/1960s television show Have Gun – Will Travel,” said Carr, “and the classic ‘stranger comes to town’ narrative that so resonated with me as a kid watching Westerns with my dad.
“This story explores disillusionment, abandonment, idealism, corruption, vigilantism, purpose, and despair. It examines the role of violence in the pursuit of peace and justice. As I wrote in my initial summary of The Fourth Option all those years ago, ‘Disillusioned by the government and institutions he dedicated his life to serving, former Navy SEAL and CIA Ground Branch operative Chris Walker is about to end his life when he receives a call that saves it.’ The book asks the question: do you burn the system down that has enabled such evil, or do you work to expose corruption and ultimately fix it? Is fixing it even possible?
“The foundation of this story was laid when I was in the single digits, enthralled with Have Gun – Will Travel. It was further envisioned during my final years of . . .