Hard Targets

I wasn't intending on reading another Bolan so soon, but because of the sad news of the death of Mike Newton I decided to read one of his. Sadly this story is the same old plot that we have seen a thousand times before. I even read the same story recently in the later published Terrorist Dispatch. Johnny Bolan is the guy supplying the memorised location of the villains businesses and so they go around together burning and shooting and blowing up and stealing the ill gotten gains. There is a sniper scene and the girlfriend gets kidnapped. Criminal gangs are set against each other, although we are not told what happened to the Irish gang leader. In the end everybody kills everybody else and the Bolan brothers wander off into the sunset. Disappointing to read the same story again. I will give it one star extra for being a Mafia story.

I imagine that if you took a look at Mike Newton's Amazon order history, you would find dozens and dozens of orders for CTRL, C and V keys. And if you looked at the keyboard itself, the others would be covered in dust. This is just another half-assed effort by someone who stopped caring long ago, and is now content to release the same book over and over again. All the Newton tropes are there: the damsel in distress, the sniper scene, the rattling of cages, and the bad taste left in the reader's mouth when they realize they've already read this same story countless times. Not even having Mack team up with his brother Johnny is enough to give it more than an average rating. Vinnie Gallo is wholly unremarkable among the series' villains, pretty much content to sit around and do fuck-all while his empire goes down in flames. Strauss and Kelly were actually decent side-villains, being corrupt cops who have the audacity to take a holier-than-thou stance with anyone who looks at them funny. It's a shame the detective Mahan character was introduced so late, because he knows there's something sinister going on in his department but we only see him a few times, generally briefly, after his introduction scene at the book's midway point. Then we have the rest of the villains, a cast of... how many? Who cares, they're even more bland than Gallo and serve no purpose than to increase the body count. The plot itself has been done countless times before, but considering this is the nine-hundred-and-fifty-three-quadrillionth book in the series it's hard to create something truly original. But somehow Newton just manages to make it even more dull without even trying. Name power must be a hell of a thing if he's still cranking them out despite his current reception. He comes so close to creating an actual conflict with Johnny's mistakenly killing a cop, but it's lazily handwaved away at the end because whoops we're at the 192nd page and it's time to wrap it up. Five stars solely because Mack and Johnny team up.