Hellfire Strike

The title of this book should have been Cut And Paste. Pretty much all that went on from cover to cover was the same action scenes over and over again. To begin with I was not excited about the plot based on the cover information, just another drug kingpin Chinese Triad story that has been done before. After reading the story, there wasn't much other than just that. The body count is ridiculous, the repetitive action scenes never seemed to stop and the times where bloody bullet riddled blown up bodies and spilled intestines took a brief break, there were far too many characters introduced, with similar sounding names, that did nothing but add confusion to the story. An interesting connection with the main villain and his mother and a US senator, and a smattering of Russian spy stuff in here, but not enough to keep this book from being a boring novel that had way too much nothing special action, that can easily be skipped in favor of just about any other Supersized Bolan adventure. There are worse out there, but not many.

Pretty good read overall here but I got annoyed with the repetitive descriptions/writing. Nothing wrong with the title by any means as far as storyline etc. but a personal observation how many times can you shoot someone and his intestines end up outside of his body? Bloody hell every time the Big Guy shot someone he was picking up his intestines up from the ground or holding them into his torso. Good read in the series recommended reading in these series.

Ok I really did not like this novel. It had very good action scenes although 2 car chase scenes in a row was a bit repetitive. What I hated most was the almost literal cast of thousands. I don't want to have to keep a scorecard on who is who and what triad they belong to. The ultimate problem is that you really don't know any of the villians. General Lu had the potential of being a top notch villian along with his mother but North bounced to the Triad Chui and the underboss bounced to Marcel then bounced to the Russian Don. I like to know the villians maybe have one or two main villians. Instead he had around 5 main villians and I really couldn't get inside anyone's head. Personally I would have dumped the Russian angle. It really wasn't needed and added just excess bulk plus diluted character depth to the main story. If the story would have focused on Mack disrupting the Triads and the General. Learning more about the General, his mother and scenes with his father the senator it would have been so much better. I also liked the DEA agent and how he wanted revenge on the Triad's for what they did to his brother and sister-in-law. Also how did Lu's mother get killed? Her character seemed to have been being built up then poof she is dead and her scene with Mack was terrorific but I would have liked a confrontation at the end between Mack and her. It would have been an 8 but that Russian storyline to me just took away from what really could have been a great story.

David North back from the dead? I'm guessing he wrote it beforehand. Anyway, Wonderfull book. This was just like an older book with Mack going from place to place kickin' ass and takin' names! My only complaint was that by the end, North had completely used up the loosing of the intestines description. Every time Mack shot someone in the gut, that someone would be unsuccessfully trying to save his intestines from spilling out. It just got old by the end. Why just his intestines? What about his stomach, liver, spleen, bladder, etc.. They're all in the same area. The last scene was one of the best final showdown scenes that I've read in the newer books. Namely, because this one lasted. The ends of Termination Point (SB #66) and Jackal Hunt (#232) were all very short lived, to the point, get in-get out but make sure you get the bad guys! This one was about 40 pages of well written Mack and the DEA dude going from place to place finishing everyone off. It did help that they were killing themselves, of course. That made Bolan's job quite a bit easier. On a scale of 1-10, I give it a 9.