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Codename: Warlock Book 2: No Limits follows an extraordinary man with the ability to read minds and use telekinesis who, despite trying to have a normal life and raise his daughter, gets pulled back into the world of crime, espionage, and deadly secrets. What inspired you to continue Tom Newell’s story in No Limits?
Tom doesn’t really have telepathy. He can’t read minds. He can sense emotions, intent, and deception. He can find you if he’s acquired your mental fingerprint. In No Limits, I wanted to explore more of the consequences of what Tom can do. For example, he can detect deception, but he can’t control what people do with the truth. He can help people, but he can’t create fairy tale endings. And I wanted to bring the story back to local incidents, not just government operations. Tom is still sought out by governments – ours and the USSR. But the Warlock infrastructure has deteriorated. And I wanted to focus on Tom, Gail, and their daughter Sue.
How does Tom’s family give him a different sense of purpose from the one he once received through Warlock, and how does becoming a father change his understanding of risk?
Tom is going to discover in No Limits that family is great – but comes with costs of its own. Especially when his abilities get involved. And Gail still has her rule – come home at any cost. Only it’s twice as important now. Tom has to make a difficult and legally murky decision to protect his family.
Tom struggles to balance his unique powers with the ordinary responsibilities of being a husband, father, and human being. What moral boundaries does Tom set for himself when using his abilities against people?
Tom doesn’t take advantage of people. Well, except for used-car dealers. But he slips a few times, sometimes in humorous ways. Sensing emotions can be tricky; it helps him navigate relationships, but it also causes him to sometimes navigate relationships with that ability when he should just do it the way everyone else does.
Can you tell us more about what’s in store for Tom Newell and the direction of the third book?
In book three, No Horizon, Tom has to make a life-altering decision with consequences that he can’t avoid. He’ll find one of his abilities comes with a cost he never anticipated. And his life is going to change when he is reminded that he can’t save everyone, with tragic personal consequences. But, spoiler alert, there is a hilarious Halloween party.
In a typical thriller series, the protagonist is in danger – that’s part of the excitement. But readers know in the back of their mind that the author is unlikely to kill off the protagonist – that would end the series. The real tension is how the protagonist survives whatever danger he’s facing. In the Warlock series, I lean into that. Tom is very hard to kill. The tension is how he solves the problem and then what the downstream effects are on Tom and everyone around him. Book four is going to extend that, with Tom having to navigate a difficult and painful personal crisis while still being Warlock. Sometimes survival isn’t about whether you live but how you continue to live. And the government is going to push the boundaries of what they expect Tom to do. To find out more, well, wait until book four comes out.
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Tom and Gail now have a daughter, Susan. They are building a new life outside the shadow of covert government operations.
At home, Tom is trying to be normal. But Tom’s impossible abilities won’t stay hidden. Because Tom won’t ignore people in danger. And he’s learning that truth has consequences he can’t control.
But the government hasn’t forgotten Warlock.
Neither have the Soviets.
Both sides pull Tom into covert, deniable missions that shouldn’t exist. Deadly sleeper agents. Nuclear threats. Secrets that refuse to stay buried.
With a daughter to protect. Gail’s rule – come home at any cost – is more important than ever.
This time, No Limits.
Codename: Warlock – Book 2 – No Limits
Zack Volker’s No Limits is a paranormal espionage thriller that mixes Cold War spy fiction with the everyday life of a man whose telepathy and telekinesis make him uniquely useful and uniquely difficult to contain. Tom Newell begins the book still connected to the secret Warlock program, but the story steadily widens beyond government missions into police investigations, organized crime, Soviet operatives, family life, business, and the constant question of what someone with his abilities should do when he knows he can help. That combination gives the novel an unusual identity. It’s a supernatural thriller with spies and covert operations, but it’s just as interested in what Tom does at breakfast, how he raises his daughter, and how he builds a life after the government decides it would rather keep Warlock at arm’s length.
The book’s greatest strength is the matter-of-fact way it handles Tom’s powers. Volker doesn’t treat telekinesis and lie detection as occasional tricks saved for spectacular scenes. They’re part of how Tom thinks, works, solves problems, and understands other people. That makes the procedural sections especially satisfying. Whether he’s tracking an intelligence target, unraveling a criminal case, disrupting a heroin network, locating oil from the air, or dealing with a Soviet sleeper agent, Tom approaches the problem methodically. The result feels like a paranormal spy thriller crossed with a procedural adventure novel. There’s plenty of action, including covert extractions and survival situations, but the appeal often comes from watching Tom figure out the cleanest way to use an extraordinary advantage against very ordinary systems.
Just as important is the domestic side of the story. Tom’s marriage to Gail and their life with Susan keep the Cold War espionage thriller elements connected to something personal. Having a child forces Tom to reconsider habits that once seemed harmless, because a toddler can’t be expected to keep daddy’s impossible abilities secret. Gail is also much more than someone waiting at home between missions. She understands the risks, challenges Tom when his choices affect the family, and helps establish the boundaries that make their unusual life function. That becomes especially important as the novel explores temptation, trust, money, friendship, and the distance Tom’s abilities can create between him and everyone else. Some of the book’s most memorable tension comes from those quieter problems because Tom can’t solve them by levitating something across a room.
No Limits ultimately works as a broad, episodic supernatural action thriller about power becoming part of daily life. Its 53 chapters move through espionage, crime solving, aviation, oil exploration, legal disputes, family milestones, and dangerous assignments, with Tom’s straightforward first-person voice holding those threads together. He’s enormously capable, so the suspense frequently comes from exposure, consequences, moral choices, and the people he cares about. For readers who enjoy paranormal espionage thrillers, Cold War spy thrillers, superpowered protagonists, detailed problem-solving, and stories that spend real time on what happens between the big missions, Codename: Warlock Book 2: No Limits offers an expansive continuation of Tom Newell’s strange attempt to live an ordinary life with decidedly extraordinary abilities.
Pages: 378 | ASIN : B0H2FL8L2W
Codename: WARLOCK
Codename: WARLOCK by Zack Volker is a coming-of-age science-fiction novel that gradually turns into a government and espionage thriller. It begins in 1975 with sixteen-year-old Tom Newell waking in a hospital after being hit by a car. Soon afterward, Tom realizes the accident has left him with extraordinary abilities. He can sense emotions and intentions, recognize lies, perceive things inside the human body, manipulate objects through telekinesis, and eventually do things that stretch far beyond those early discoveries. Volker takes his time with this transformation. Tom doesn’t wake up and immediately become a costumed superhero. He experiments, makes mistakes, tests limits, and spends a surprising amount of time worrying about who might notice. That patient approach gives the early part of the book an appealing sense of discovery. The question isn’t simply what Tom can do. It’s what a seventeen-year-old is supposed to do with abilities that can affect almost every part of his life.
Tom’s powers become especially interesting because they change the way he understands other people. He can’t easily ignore anger, fear, deception, or malicious intent because he can literally sense them. That makes high school drama, family conflict, relationships, and even casual conversations different for him. One of the strongest stretches of the novel involves the collapse of his family life. After discovering his father’s affair and being pushed out of his parents’ home, Tom returns to the family property on his seventeenth birthday and realizes, “I wasn’t sure where home was, but it wasn’t here anymore.” It’s a simple line, but it captures something important about the character. For all the extraordinary things Tom can do, many of his problems are painfully ordinary. He’s a teenager trying to figure out who he can trust, where he belongs, and what kind of adult he wants to become. His abilities may protect him physically, but they don’t spare him from abandonment, loneliness, or disappointment.
Gail becomes central to that process, and her relationship with Tom gives the book much of its emotional continuity. Their romance develops quickly, including marriage while they’re still young, but Volker spends considerable time showing them negotiating what life with Tom’s abilities actually means. Gail isn’t simply someone Tom rescues or someone who accepts every decision he makes. She establishes boundaries, particularly once she understands that Tom can sense her feelings, detect lies, manipulate nerve signals, and protect her in ways she can’t reciprocate. Their discussions about honesty, consent, secrecy, money, and danger make the relationship feel like a working partnership. That’s important because the scale of the story keeps expanding. High school problems give way to flying, government investigations, intelligence work, hijackings, kidnappings, counterintelligence operations, and missions overseas. Gail provides a personal center while Tom’s life becomes increasingly unusual.
The second half of the novel leans heavily into Tom’s evolution from unusually capable teenager to classified national asset, eventually receiving the codename Warlock. This section has the feel of a procedural thriller. Volker is interested in how extraordinary abilities might actually interact with ordinary institutions, so there are briefings, cover identities, aircraft, security classifications, debriefings, government handlers, operational rules, and arguments over jurisdiction and secrecy. Tom’s powers also continue developing in practical directions. He learns what he can accomplish by combining perception, mental tracking, telekinesis, and his instinctive awareness of danger. That makes many of the missions enjoyable because the solution often comes from Tom applying a familiar ability in a new way. The pacing is episodic, with one challenge often following another fairly quickly, but the episodes steadily build the consequences of Tom’s visibility. The more useful he becomes, the harder it is for him and the government to keep Warlock from leaving a trail.
What I enjoyed most about Codename: WARLOCK is the way it combines wish fulfillment with persistent questions about responsibility. Tom becomes immensely powerful, financially secure, highly skilled, happily married, and valuable to the government, so the book clearly enjoys letting him become exceptionally competent. At the same time, it repeatedly asks what that competence obligates him to do. He can walk past a problem and protect his secret, or he can intervene and risk exposing himself. Again and again, he chooses to help. By the final chapters, that pattern circles back to Sheriff Stockton, one of the first people to suspect that there was something impossible about Tom, asking him to risk exposure to save a child during a storm. The ending then brings the story back to family in a much more hopeful way, with Tom sensing that Gail is pregnant before she can tell him. It fits the book well. Codename: WARLOCK is ultimately a story about a young man discovering enormous power while building a life around it, and its most memorable moments come from watching Tom decide what kind of person that power will allow him to be.
Pages: 340 | ASIN : B0FVD3VDT5
