Counterblow

Have to agree with everyone else this is a shocker. It's all been said previously in other reviews but it is just so hard to read. A reader should slide seamlessly from start to finish in a good title I reckon, add on a good plot/storyline some good characters and write some fine action scenes and the title will undoubtedly rank in the top books of these series as listed on this site. Unfortunately the author had none of the above here. Not recommended in any way.

I agree with the rest of the reviews. This book was pretty slow at times and there were too many characters with their own agendas and more. I wasn't sure a great deal of the time of who was on which side. Better luck next time.

I will refer to this novel as the title it should have been -- Colonblow. Oh man, what a crappy book. I couldn't figure out what the hell was going on througout the whole thing. There were so many characters, all with their own agendas, their own allies and enemies, and nobody seemed to know what they were really doing, or what was going on, including Mack Bolan. The gist of the story is a former soviet KGB man named Sharkov is now in the business of running a drug pipeline around the Pakistan area, and the Afghan named Hikmal is getting money from the russian so he can buy guns. Thats pretty much all I could figure out what was supposed to be going on anyway. What a fricken mess. This story has so many loose ends, too many characters doing too many nonsensical things, the storyline was one of the most disjointed and confusing that I have ever read in my life. The author seemed to be scraping random ideas and situations together in a pile and making that his complete manuscript. I stopped trying to follow the story early in the novel, and it would take a review as long as the book itself to explain all the problems within this pile of fecal matter. Mack Bolan himself was as confused as I was, so at least I wasn't alone. A warning to Bolan readers out there: stay away from this goat-scrotum book. Because of some decent action scenes here and there, I will give Colonblow 2 generous stars.

A new crop of heroin is appearing on the West Coast, and Bolan tracks it to a rogue KGB agent. Bolan pursues him to Afghanistan. Many betrayals later, Bolan kills him. Oy, what a rotten book. There were way to many double and triple crosses. It was nearly impossible to tell who was fighting who. And Bolan was uncharacteristically wishy-washy. Half the time he didn't want to be there, or he was captured, or needed to be bailed out by an enemy. Very disjointed, not at all cohesive -- this one is a low point, and not worth the effort to get through 300+ pages.

This book could have been quite good, if one problem had been ironed out. The problem was quite simple: this was not a Mack Bolan story. We have a situation where high grade heroin is being smuggled into America from Afghanistan, where a former KGB officer has gone into business for himself. The story, characters, action and the locations were all very realistic, but it just wasn't a Bolan adventure. If Gerald Seymour or David Morrell had written it with a different character then it would have been an excellent yarn. For a Bolan novel the action was too slow and Bolan was given such strange dialogue such as "We have to operate within the rules" and "We are out of our juristiction here [inside Pakistan]". This is all after Brognola "instructed" Bolan to look into the problem of the drug smuggling. A good story but too slow for a Bolan.

NO BIGGIE AT ALL.

A blah entry from McDade. Not the book I thought it was going to be.