Glenn

I bought and read this book 40 years ago, so high time for a re-read. First off, the cover gets 10/10 from me. This was the third GE book that I read and one of the first that I bought. I love this painting. The wet road reflecting the motorbikes and Bolan semi-hiding around the corner sold it to me. I would love to own the original painting, or even see it somewhere. The good points is that this story has barely aged at all. If you ignore the lack of technology then it seems that nothing has changed in the world. France is still subject to terrorist bombings and Russia are still interfering in political elections of foreign countries. The bad is that the story is a slog to get through. The writing isn't that great and the story is sometimes repetitive. I lost track of how many times Bolan was ambushed and how many rental cars he smashed up. He fumbles and bumbles his way around France, his enemies are even more inept than he is, and as previously reviewed, he says weird things to people like "You want some bread?" American slang would have gone over the heads of all French people back in the mid 1980's. Not forgetting that everybody in this book speaks perfect American English. I also found the ending silly with the magnesium strips. Suddenly they are in Bolan's pocket and somehow he drops them on to an attacking paraglider without them drifting to far away. I found this daft back in 1986 I I still find it daft today. Cover brillinat. Story so-so

I am going to both agree and disagree with the previous reviewer. Yes, I agree, the mission briefing for the Teams in the early chapters of the book are a mess, and yes, the characters do morph into one another, which is annoying considering the authors experience at writing Phoenix Force and Stony Man novels, as well as not being picked up by the editors. But the rest of the novel was not boring at all. Once past the mission briefing the adventure picked up. Phoenix Force are split up, half of the team, including Katz, are sent to France and Israel. McCarter's half are sent to Kurdistan, and for me what happens there is the high light of the story. Able Team run around New York and that part of the story was fairly generic, but otherwise okay. The adventure is dated, being written in 2000. The tech is old. Saddam Hussein is still alive and 9/11 has yet to happen. The villain was quite well fleshed out as were various other guest characters. So, I enjoyed it. A few stars of for the mess of the mission briefing, but otherwise a good story.

First up - the title is awful. A similar title was used for a Phoenix Force novel, so why this was almost reused boggle the mind, especially when the phrase 'Direct Action' is used in the story and even 'Industrial Sabotage' was used on the rear cover. I came across a new word when reading this, that rarely happens in a novel and certainly not in an Executioner. Susurrus. Ever wonder how Stony Man coped during the political turmoil of 2016 - 2020? Here you will find a glimpse of the answer ( and I love Hal Brognola's comment of "Tell me something, Barbara. Have I missed something or have general IQ's dropped in the last year or two?". This was in response to the departure of a government lickspittle amusingly named Christian Payne. In fact, I kind of enjoyed the political substory where Barbara Price is offered the top job as Brognola has fallen out of favour with the current President. I could also speculate that this falling out of favour eventually lead to the closure of Stony Man Farm... As for the main story, I thoroughly enjoyed it and first time (and final time) author John Helfers handles Bolan extremely well. Bolan accepts an unusual mission - mainly because POTUS wants to help out a billionaire blowhard in Australia - in that he has to investigate the killing of two security guards at a gas extraction facility in Australia. There are a few good gunfights and some well developed side characters which is surprising in so short a novel. Eventually it turns out to be a false flag (another potential title?) operation and Bolan dispenses justice his way. So a really intriguing adventure, and it is a shame that Helfers did not get to write any more Executioner stories.

The copyright page incorrectly claims that Mike Newton is the author, but this is incorrect as it is Michael A Black. I was fascinated by the opening chapter of Bolan being in southern Yemen on a mission to assassinate a terrorist as it so closely mirrored the opening of my own Bolan adventure, Armed Response. Definitely a case of great minds think alike :) I did enjoy the opening chapter. There was a lot of information in short a short novel and I think Black handled it well. The villains, were quite well fleshed out, although I did tire of Novak's constant chess references. In all honesty, the plot would have worked better in a slightly larger novel. There is a lot of globe trotting as well for such a short novella. We move from Yemen to Syria to Washington to Ethiopia to Washington to Virginia and I have no idea how long the adventure would have taken place, but I guess about a week? If I had to find fault, it would be this. I have looked back at reviews of other books by this author, and I have to agree that his portrayal of Jack Grimaldi is awful. Grimaldi comes across as a total ass and I cannot imagine such an unprofessional character existing in a special ops team. Equally, he was more commando than pilot and I wonder why Black did not just use one of the other Stony Man characters, or even continue with one of the spec ops team introduced in the opening chapters. But all in all this was an enjoyable romp.

Because I am now the proud owner of the original painting I decided to give The Trial a re-read. it has been 32 years! since I read it back in 1992 so I guess it is time. One of the best pieces of dialogue in any Bolan book takes place when Bolan introduces himself to his lawyer. "It's not Blanski. It's Bolan. Mack Bolan." "I see. This changes everything." I don't have the book with me at the moment so I cannot give you the exact quote, but I loved it 32 years ago and I still love the whole exchange now. The book is also unusual in that there is hardly any action. There is a two page fist fight in a prison cell and then Bolan's escape at the end of the novel. So the body count can easily be done on two hands (we are not told how many are killed by the Mafia in their clumsy assault on the court.) But I must admit I do have problems with the novel. It definitley needed a re-write or tigtening up. The whole plot by the Mafia's external hire, the Rancher was clumsy and amateurish. The prosecution and the defense lawyers were not very good. Even though this was probably written in 1985 the whole case should never have made it to court, the evidence is too circumstantial and even I, without legal knowledge, could have driven a bus through the prosecution's case. A lot of characters from Bolan's past are introduced, including Susan Landry, Al Weatherbee and many others. Hal Brognola shows up as well but the question is why as half way through the novel they are forgotten about and do not seenm to be present at the final courtroom escape and shootout. Where did they go? Why was there not more security when it was discovered that the local cops had The Executioner in custody? Surely all the alphabet agencies would have shown up in force, all wanting a peice of the Bolan pie. But the biggest problem I did have was that this was really a 186 page novel with lots and lots of padding. So many characters had so many meandering thoughts about nothing that drove the plot forward that it became dull to read and easily skipable. And that is a shame because there really is a unique and interesting concept of Bolan behind bars just straining to escape. I think with a little more plotting this story would have been one of the best of the Gold Eagle range. But it does have one of the best cover paintings in the entire series. ;)

In light of Douglas Wojotwicz's unfortunate passing I decided to pay my respects by reading his final foray into the world of Mack Bolan. Doug and I corresponded a lot back in the day, but since the decision was made to close down Gold Eagle and the publishing of Bolan adventures our communication became less and less. Righteous Fear is the penultimate book in the Bolan series. The body count is massive as Bolan cuts through white supremacists and Islamic fundamentalists, finally finishing at the mansion of a power mad evangelical preacher. You would be forgiven for thinking that this is a standard shoot anything that moves novel with zero story line, but you would be wrong. There is a strong story and equally strong characters both good guys and bad. And this surprised me for such a short novel. It really was a joy to read, despite bodies being every where. If I had a complaint then it would be that Bolan seems a little too inextricable, and gunfight while riding a quadbike in the opening chapters is implausible. I really enjoyed Doug's final adventure in the Bolan universe, and I am deeply sorry that your own personal adventure ended the way it did. Stay Frosty, Doug.

I am lucky enough to own one of the 45 paperbacks that Gold Eagle printed for Michael Newton. Due to that I quickly read the story and I have to say that it was thoroughly enjoyable. I won't give the plot away but there are only 6 villains instead of hordes and due to this the story takes on a more personal aspect. If I had any complaint then it would be that Bolan wasn't challenged too much and both Jack Grimaldi and Hal Brognola acted unprofessionally on occasions. But otherwise this was a very entertaining story and should be checked out.

This is the first novel that I have read by this author, and boy, did I enjoy it. An exciting and fast moving story set in Detroit that takes place over approximately 12 hours. I loved the main characters, especially Allison Hart and Denny Seles. I was disappointed that there was little time for mourning the death of Hart at the end. The villains were resonably fleshed out, the main players were not the usual cardboard cutout ragheads. The location was excellently described, and I too feel that the author has lived there. The street scenes where Detroit is being torn apart by riots is especially realistic. If there is a flaw then it is a tiny one. It seems Brognola was frequently confused with Kurtzman as we have several situations where Brognola 'works his magic of the Stony Man databases'. I will certainly be reading more of this author's work.

Bolan grows a beard! Such a shame that the front cover depicts Bolan after he has had a bikini wax on his mug! The first part of this book was pretty standard, we have Bolan together with Enzico and James tracking a terrorist network around the world, shooting everything up then following the breaadcrumbs to the next location and so on. Sometimes it was unclear as to the links or how the villain / goons were involved. In fact I found the story to be so standard that I actually left my copy to go and read two other books in between, something that i almost never do. But then we move on to Baghdad at that is where the story really starts to kick in. I got the sense that the other had first hand or mabybe close second hand knowledge of the city because it is so well written. Then we get to the suicide bombers attack on the road block and the subsequent action that follows. Never in all my years of reading Bolan have I come across an action scene that is so well written that I actually felt that I was there. Never have I felt the horror of an attack so closely. We move away from the "Die-Hard" style of action to something that more resembles "The Hurt Locker" or "Generation Kill". Wow. But then we leave Iraq and move to Syria (and current events have deated the book somewhat) and we move back to the normal flow of action which seemed somewhat of a let down after the horror of Baghdad. The biggest annoyance that I have with the novel is what happens to James and Enzico? Both are perforated like tea-bags, both are knocking at deaths door - and whilst we know that they cannot die because they have a G.E. contract - it would have been nice to know how they are doing at the end of the novel. The book is worth its cover price for the Baghdad sequence, so if you can get hold of a copy then do so.

I thought that I would give this one a shot because the subject is so topical. Unfortuntely I was disappointed in this novel, and not because the mission was standard fair for the Stony Man teams, but the opening chapters seemed so dated. I could not get around the fact that where as in the real world the Chinese steal everything from space shuttle designs to that of Joint Strike Fighters and even car designs of BMW (they even recently hacked Coca-Cola to try to steal the formula) here we are treated to the shock horror over everybody from the White House downwards "What? The Chinese have pinched a circuit board? How could they? Why would they? How wicked of them." Please, the circuit board was probably made in China. So off they go to China and Texas to wrap up the smuggling organisation. The action scenes were good although I found the Chinese cast to be wooden and stereotypical. It was annoying that Mea Anna gets caught twice, though. And in the end our boys (and girl) win through, and only one baddie escapes to return at some later date.

I must have bought this book 20 years ago, and finally I get around to read it. The pages have long since turned yellow but never mind. It wasn't a bad story, nor was it original. The old chase across the country thing has been done countless times in books and films, even Clint Eastwood did it in The Gauntlet. So here Mack Bolan gets put through it thanks to Mike Newton. And I would have liked it if it were not for two gaping plot holes. The first goes like this: Brognola: We have a witness and we want you to escort him across country along with your brother. Bolan: My brother is a civilian, I'll do it, but send Able Team to help. Brognola: No we want your brother. And you have to drive the whole way. Bolan: How about Phoenix Force as back up? And Jack can fly us to LA. Brognola: No, we want to risk the life of your civilian brother, and we want you to drive all the way. So that is the first plot hole, but it had to be done for the sake of the story line. The second plot hole is, however, huge, and the whole story just falls apart. So DEA agent Pratt arrests Aguire and uses him to bait Vos out of Columbia so that he can be arrested on US soil and Pratt becomes the big boy in the DEA. So far so good except.....Pratt is really working for Vos the whole time, and has loads of contacts inside the Mafia, the KKK and biker gangs. If Pratt was a bad guy why on earth did he go through the whole sting operation to get Vos on US soil? Why bother? This smakes no sense, and that is why this book gets only 5 stars.

Special guest star: David McCarter. Not a bad story but it contained no surprises. The Chinese are the villains, even though they are trying to recover their property from a spy (?!?!), a laptop with missile data on the hard drive. I was often left wondering why Bolan didn't remove the hard drive instead of lugging the laptop around. So the female spy with the big boobies is stranded/captured in Burma and Bolan is sent in to rescue her and recover the laptop. So begins a trek through the jungle wher alliances are formed and broken and there are chases and explosions aplenty. All the characters wete well fleshed out, but I was disappointed that so many of Bolan's allies were killed off. I read this story because I didn't want it to date too quickly due to the changing situation in Burma, but very little was mentioned of the politics or the junta. So not bad, enjoyable, but not spectacular either.

Reading this story was like wading through mud. It took me an entire week to get through it, I found it such heavy going, and it took me only until page 46 to realise why. A couple of reviewers mentioned that something was missing orthat something wasn't quite right. For me it was two things. First the Executioner was more like the Terminator than Mack Bolan. Bolan shrugs off wounds and bruises so easily. We are sometimes reminded that it hurts but I was often expecting Bolan to pluck out his eye and don a pair of dark sunglasses. At other times Bolan was more like Batman, I think that Christopher Nolan must have used this story as inspiration for The Dark Knight. The other thing was for location. If it were not for the backcover we would never know that we were in Afghanistan. We are only informed that Bolan is in Chaman at around page 150. This gave the story a very generic feel, we could have been anywhere. There was no description of heat, sand, flies or even local population. All very bland. And when I checked where Chaman was, I found it to be in Pakistan, on the border with Afghanistan. Needless to say I did not like this one at all. I could find no redeming features in it at all.

This is, surprisingly, the first Phil Elmore that I have read. So what did I think? Well, it wasn't bad, but it wasn't brilliant either. The plot is a standard one of lets go and hit the enemy where it hurts - alternatively known as rattling the cages. Phoenix Force made journeys of incredible distance in no time whatsoever, in the mean time Able Team just managed to travel around New York State. What I did love were the villains - Than and Thawan. They were extremely well fleshed out to the point that you even felt a little sorry for them at the end (but only a little bit). There was also a chapter involving Hal Brognola that happens to have nothing to do with the main story. It is virtually a stand alone short story and feels out of place in the middle of the novel. Perhaps if it had been placed in the beginning of the novel it wouldn't have been so clunky. But the regime change felt wrong. In the last Stony Man that I read - 119 Close Quarters - McCarter gets angry at Brognola over the fact that Able are used for political assasination. Here McCarter actively takes part in it. The inconsistancy is not the authors fault, but to me it felt wrong. So all in all an average novel. But I will check out another Phil Elmore soon.

Unlike the other reviewers I really enjoyed this story. It was fast paced and, unlike the last Bolan in Sudan that I read (Terror Spin) it was not claustrophobic. There was a sense that the Sudan is a vast place. The mercenaries that Bolan hires are a colourful bunch, although at times I couldn't remember who was the Russian and who was the Serb. The firefights were intense and well written with no feeling of vagueness that impairs many other stories. And, of course, I always enjoy a good African story. And speaking of distance, Mr Rogers pulls is usual trick of moving Bolan vast distances in very little time. In chapter 1 Bolan is in Kenya and by chapter 2 `He now found himself in Chad´. A distance of 1,800 kilometers or 1,300 miles (I just checked). Why Chad was needed I do not know, it would have made more sense to meet in Kenya. And why where the French agents so obsessed with meeting in Bruges, a Belgian town? I didn’t get that, must have missed something somewhere. And how on earth did Bolan and frinds keep their iPads online in the middle of the desert? Within a day the batteries would be empty and how they picked up broadcasts from satellites I’ll never know. But the biggest sore plot point keeping this from being a ten was the needless introduction of the small pox mcguffin. I believe that this was used to introduce the Chinese, but if Mr Rogers wished to introduce the Chinese he could have worked it differently, say by having the Chinese recognize Bolan from past missions and wishing to capture him or kill him. This way Bolan would have become a liability on his own mission. Far more interesting than small pox. So a really good story in the vein of the film Tears of the Sun. Very good, Mr Rogers, very good indeed.

I would like to start this review by making an appeal to Jon Guenther. Please, please, please stop putting "English" idioms, colloquialisms and jargon into McCarters mouth. Nine times out of ten they are inappropriately used and make for painful reading. Nobody but nobody walks up to someone and says "How are you doing, bloke?" It should be "How are you doing, mate?" So please, drop the "bloke", "mate", "chum" and "luv" from the stories. But on to the story Close Quarters. Raymond Chandlers law states that when in doubt have men with guns burst into the room. This applies to writers block - and I am not saying that Jon had writers block - but this 'plot point' was used over and over again. It quickly became tiresome. How did the bad guys located Phoenix Force so quickly in Paraguay? Nobody knows, but shooting started for very little reason. And it happened far to often. And I lost the plot. Literally. What was it all about? A group of volunteers are kidnapped because the Hezbollah and Iranians didn't want to attract attention to their electronic smuggling business? But, but....by kidnapping the group they did exactly the opposite. Bad guys don't need to be smart, but in fiction there should be a plot to keep the reader reading. Returning to the other plot....Able Team are in Tehran! Yes, Able Team are operating abroad! Wonderful! Kudos to Mr Guenther. Unfortunately the plot got lost here as well. Able Team end up working for the bad guys to kill other bad guys? I think that was it. I think that they were met to extract the one informer/bad guy but ended up being led around by the nose and having bad guys with guns burst into the room. Good points: Able Team in Iran. Cool cover. The ending with the Iranian warships was pretty good, although it could have been better detailed. I do question how Phoenix Force managed to travel half way around the world just to show up in the nick of time, but oh well. So all in all I found that McCarters speech patterns through me out of the story every time, and there wasn't a clear enough plot to engage me.

What on earth is a "terror spin" ? This book is identical to Mike Newton's previous SuperBolan's and Stony Man novels, Vendetta, Vortex, Blood Debt to name but a few. It has Bolan and a few select friends run from location to location shooting and shooting and shooting. There is no plot whatsoever, just the usual copy and paste template work. It stretched incredibility that every time Bolan met with a contact be it in Sudan or France, the contact would know the names and addresses of every single bad guy hideout. The contacts could recite it by rote! Unbelievable. I also found it unbelievable that Brognola would split up Phoenix Force whilst they were embarking on a dangerous mission....why not use Able Team for once? No, lets split Phoenix, not that it made any difference, cardboard cutouts would have sufficed. And the musings! Have I mentioned the musings yet? Pages and pages and pages of the same crap over and over again. The good guys mused the same things, the bad guys mused the same thing, and all it is is page filler, expanding an Executioner into a SuperBolan. There was a good bit that Mr Newton went and spoilt at the end. Bolan and pals, after attacking a Spear of Allah outpost are pursued across the desertby the Sudanese army and decide to make a stand at a rocky outcropping. Running low on ammunition they are wondering how they will survive. This is quite a tense scene, but it is ruined by the timely rescue of Sudanese rebels coming to their aid. I would much rather that Bolan and pals fought their way out then the rebels show themselves. Still it was a good sequence of events. So, standard fair from Mr Newton, if you have read one then you have read them all.

Where to start with book 400? Let's start on the outside. And like SuperBolan 100 and Stony Man 100 the good people at Gold Eagle decided to celebrate this milestone by doing......absolutely nothing. So low is their disinterest in what they sell that the author was unaware that he had written book 400 until he was informed on this website. Gold Eagle didn't even bother to phone or write an email asking for something a little different, even though that had happened for book 300 (despite that author handling it badly). So 400 didn't even register on GE's radar. A big fat zero for effort. And what about the cover? What do we have there? A special stand out cover? No, what we get is a supermarket price tag in the upper left hand corner. That's all there is to celebrate 400. Why bother getting out of bed, Gold Eagle? Staying on the cover, the incidents on the lower section do not take place in the story. It is the wrong helicopter and it certainly does not blow up, the cabin doesn't catch fire, and in any event why is the cabin out of scale compared to the helicopter? Very poorly done, mr photoshop cover artist. Like the people at Gold Eagle you too get a zero for your lack of effort. As for the story itself, as already stated the author was unaware that it was 400 so wrote a regular Mack Bolan adventure and quite a low key one it was. Bolan happens to be in Seattle (finishing something but we are not told what) when he stumbles onto a plot involving a corrupt senator and a Russian gangster after rescuing a police officer. Bolan proceeds to follow the clues leaving a trail of bodies in his wake. There are some very good stand out scenes in the novel, the gunfight in the small town half way through the adventure (when the bad guys helicopter lands in the middle of the street) and the second gunfight at the cabin (involving the waterfall). However there were items n the story that jarred. I couldn't understand why the senator wanted to involve himself with a Russian gangster when the whole plot revolved around oil drilling rights. Surely the senator being as rich and as powerful as he was could have found a better partner? Equally confusing was the evidence gather by the one good cop, Logan. Surely he knew that illegal wiretaps and searches would work in a court. So what was he planning to do? His moaning towards the end of the novel ("..It was all for nothing! My evidence is wasted! The senator is going to get away with it..") had a very false ring to it. Did he expect things to be any different or was he really so naive? So all in all an average entry in the Bolan series, the finger of blame points not at the author but at the people in 225 Duncan Mill Rd, Don Mills, Canada who have once again demonstrated that they really couldn't give a damn (and to be fair I do know that Gold Eagle are chronically understaffed, and that this lack of commitment and interest stems from higher up the food chain).

I really enjoyed this book. No nukes of the week this time, no saving the planet from destruction, this is a low key story about organised crime, drug dealing and a certain wheeler dealer called Rosey Tosca. There is little action, Bolan isn't always at the forefront, but what there is is characterisation. The characters are painted in such a way that it is easy to visualise them and identify with them (even the villains). And there is a genuine thought out plot, not a 'made up as I go along' plot. Even more surprising, Bolan doesn't kill the bad guys this time around, they all (almost all) get arrested. Well written, well thought out, and easily recommended.

**contains spoilers** The problem with these shorter Executioner novels is quite simple; there is no space for story or character development. What we have is a story that could have developed into a James Rollins-esque archeological adventure, but was wasted inbetween the prerequistite firefights and some nonsense about a Russian chemical weapons base that was built on top of a lost mountain based castle of Alexander the Great. The novella certainly started off well enough, the eccentric billionaire hiring mercenaries to protect him, the opening hit on the billionaires house, all good stuff. But by the time we get to Azerbeijan the main drive of the plot is lost to shooting, shooting and more pointless shooting. Two of the mercs are predictable traitors, and in the end every one dies except Bolan and the girl. What a waste of an interesting storyline.

I really cannot think of a lot to say about this one. I enjoyed part one (New York) and the gun battles there far more than I did part two (Burma). The story hasn't aged very well considering the current (almost weekly) developments taking place there. Obviously when written the country wasn't has locked down as it is now. Bolan is up against Colonel Thaung, a wannabe drug lord. Seems he has the product but no idea how to get it into America, and he is extremely naive about its true worth (no market research then?). He is an underdeveloped villain who we are occasionly meant to feel sorry for, but this doesn't really work. In addition he has a couple of interchangable, undeveloped henchmen who add very little to the overall story. Of course this is a Feildhouse story, so Bolan's gun gets kicked out of his hand several times which results in the requiste hand to hand combat. Bolan infiltrates Burma as an agent for the South American cartels and manages to get to Thaung without too much effort, the naive Thaung shows Bolan the poppy fields and of course Bolan blows everything up, with a little help from some rebels. He does get tortured and beaten, but manages to overcome all injuries to continue with his attack. All in all an average entry.

I am going to go against all of the other reviews here. To me this book should have come with an health warning, something like 'Beware of repetetive brain injury, or "Danger of being bored to death". I found it so dull, and so slow to get through. The plot - was little there was of it - is identical to other Newton offerings such as Vendetta or Blood Debt. Bolan and Phoenix (no Able in this one) move from warehouse to warehouse just shooting, taking down the drug barons kingdom. They have perfect intelligence, no explanation as to how they came by it, and just move with easy through Turkey, Georgia and Russia, each time going through the motions. They even know exactly when an arms convoy will be moving through a certain street. On and on it plods, the same thing every few pages. But that wasn't what bugged me. What bugged me was the constant repetative musings by the various good guys and bad. It seemed that almost half the book was given over to padding the story with a chapter on what the bad guys were thinking (will my chums in the mafiya still be my friends after this? Wait until I find out who is doing this, then they will be sorry!). On and on it went, every bad guy thinking the same thing. And when they had finished musing we were subjected to near identical musings by Brognola and all at the Farm. Boring! I was actually skipping whole sections just to get back to the repetative action sequences. The only things that I did like was that Bolan's Russian ally survived the adventure, and the attack on the Mafia in the beginning. Otherwise I have nothing good to say about this novel.

My, was this one action packed book. Non stop explosions and shooting from cover to cover. As this was my first Bolan in six months I found myself really enjoying it. The way the minions of the Beast knew where Bolan and company would be almost before they arrived was brilliantly done. For me the stand out action scene must be the seige on the island. These few chapters are worth the price of the book on their own. But as brilliant as this story was it did have a few down points. Bolan goes along collecting allies to assist him in his wars - so many in fact that I lost track of who was who, which characters had died, which were still living. When character X dies then I had to flick back to find out which one that was. Very distracting. Additionally - and it could be that I missed a few lines somewhere (or they were edited out) - I could not fathom why Bolan pinpointed Berlin as the villains location based purely on the fact that a few goons were speaking German. The demise of the Beast was also a mild disappointment, in fact the whole Berlin sequence felt rushed. This book is worth buying. It isn't quite as good as Savage Game or Oceans of Fire, but it is way way better than a lot of the Bolan novels out there.

I wasn't too impressed with this story. Once again it is nuke of the week and once again there is a mad villain who wants revenge. What I did like, for some reason, was the character of Sheppard, and I have to agree with another review when he says that with the death of Sheppard the story foundered. Liked: Scotland and Afghanistan locations. Disliked: The constant killing of companions (and thanks Gold Eagle for telling us on the inside cover that one of Bolan's compainions would be killed and for giving us the name of the betrayer. Thanks, keeps the suspense going - not!). The use of fictional islands and countries. How that bores me.

The page count is reduced, the book is flimsier, and the publishers once again missed an opportunity with book 100. Like SuperBolan 100 there is nothing special about the story what so ever. What we have is an average tale, with the most unlikely group of criminals all teaming up together with only one goal in mind, to wreck havoc by killing some rich western industrialists. Of course, these terrorists and criminals are barely past page two before they start killing each other. PF and AT lend a helping hand, and before you know it, the Saudi's, Hezbollah, Al-Qaeda, North Koreans, Chinese, Mexicans and Columbians are all killed off. And that is about it really. There is a back story to the Frazier Group (a sort of Bilderburg / Carlyle Group) but that only serves as page filler, and Phoenix Force are fawning over a robot dog thing that spews out gas, but otherwise nothing stuck out for book 100. An average story from Ron Renauld, and Gold Eagle missed the target again.

Rich Rainey's final Executioner is much better than his previous entry of "Uforce", but as an Executioner it was pretty average. A mercenary team has sold themselves to the drugs cartels and they are foolishly making massive waves by killing off DEA and FBI guys en masse. Enter Bolan. Mack is a team player here, brought in by an over worked Brognola to help out. Carvaggio is reintroduced, and killed on the final page in a useless shoot out. Other characters are introduced and then disappear such as Sandy Rowan. Bolan himself disappears for chapters at a time, then reappears to do something only to disappear again - and I thought that his excursion to Mexico to join in on the raid of the drug baron was a waste of time. So, all in all, an average Executioner novel.

I found this story to be overhyped, unfortunately. It could have been, and should have been, much better, but Bolan's side of the story just seemed so drawn out that that it actually became boring. The good first. I liked all of the Korean characters. Renauld did a good job in fleshing them all out - although I somethimes got lost with the unfamiliar names - and the only disappointment was not finishing the stories of Prync, Dahn and Park. But the rest was good reading. The not so good. Jayne Bahn. I could accept the way that she showed up in the begining of the story, but then she just tagged along, and I just cannot see how the FBI would allow a bounty hunter to become involved in their investigations (Bolan was using his fake Justice ID). That didn't seem right and spolied the story somewhat. The bad: Where as Renauld did a good job with his Korean characters, he messed up badly with the Stony Man regulars. Kissinger isn't just an arms expert, he is also a computer expert and fills in for Akira Tokaido at the computer stations. Clever guy! But then there is Akira himself. Yes he has been out in the field before, but never like this. He can now, apparently, do HALO jumps and hold is own when he leading, yes leading, a combat patrol of marines. My goodness! In fact, this Akira doesn't resemble the old Akira in any way what so ever. An imposter. The really bad: Editing. A couple of times Kissinger and Kurtzman changed places and identities. Kissenger was wounded when out playing with Mack, but to pinch Kurtzman's wheelchair is beyond a joke. What? The author became confused between the two (both begin with 'K') and the editors never noticed?? How is this possible? The impossible. The coincidences. Bolan just happens to stumble upon a gang that are directly liked to the bad guys in Korea who happen to kidnap Akira's cousin, whom Akira has never met but just happens to be visiting and...and...well there are several more coincidences and this is what brought the story down for me. That, and Akira's night time parachute jump into the jungle, and Kissinger in a wheelchair.

Concept: interesting Execution: rubbish I have finally worked out why I have never liked Peter Leslie's novels. I have been avoiding this novel for quite some time - the last Leslie that I read was Blowout about four years ago - but seeing as this book was published exactly 20 years ago I thought that I would give it a go. This isn't really a Mack Bolan novel, an imposter has taken his place. Peter Leslie didn't write Bolan novels, he wrote stories more appropriate for 'Boys Own Adventure Annual'. The development of the characters, or lack there of, the dialogue, the construction of the story was really better suited for 12 year olds, this is how they think the spy world works. Bolan the imposter does many silly things like swinging around in a concrete bucket attachted to a construction crane, shimming down a metal hawser in the rain, and the one that made me laugh was the false tooth! Yes, folks, Bolan apparantly has a false tooth that he can unscrew and extract two sleeping pills that he keeps there! An unscrewable tooth! What brilliant rubbish! So Bolan the imposter gets captured by the mafia in the first chapter of the book, because they think that Bolan knows all about some agent that has just been killed in Europe. Why they think that is never explained, along with the fabulous mafia plot to take over Europe? I seriously doubt that the bunch of morons that The Imposter went up against in this novel were capable of taking over their local shoe shop. So, anyway, Bolan is captured and the mafia want a friendly chat with him, and I do mean a friendly chat, to see what he knows. The mafia sitting around the table with The Executioner? Yeah, right. Like that would ever happen! The Imposter fumbles and bumbles around Europe, the mafia fumble and bumble after him. After a long drawn out chase where The Imposter escapes from the mafia for the zillionth time, we are left with the sentence "...Hal, this operation has only just started." as if too imply that there would be a sequal. Thank heavens there wasn't. And I forgot to mention, everybody and his dog knew Bolan by name, the local DC police knew Bolan 'works' for/with Brognola, and nobody batted an eyelid. Gads! On the plus side, Peter Leslie was always good at his locations, there was a real sense of being in Europe in 1989. And the title was good as well. The rest was a waste of time.

My first Mike Linaker in two years! The plot is quite simple and cookie cutter, but sitting in front of my caravan in the sun I found myself enjoying it. There is not a lot really to say about the story itself. Bolan's actual role is quite minor compared to the other two teams, and the list of characters in the story itself is quite large and sometimes confusing. I did like Bolan being identified at the end of the novel by the villain (something that happens all too rarely). So, not a spectacular novel, but definately something for the sun.

A couple of firsts for me with this title, it is the first of the new shorter format novels and the first Peter Spring that I have read. Where to start....hmmm, well the plot is resonably okay, Arab terrorists want to attack US carriers with stinger missles, and disable the electronic defeses with a stolen program. I must really question the motivations of the software engineers, though. 'Oh, nobody likes us in our company so rather than quit and go work somewhere else, we'll steal the codes, give it to terrorists and let them kill thousands of sailors; there that will make our company sorry that they were mean to us!' I liked Peter Spring's flowery description and way of writing, I will definately have to read Black Death Rising which is sitting on my book shelf, however the story really suffers in the new short format. I felt that Peter must have delivered his manuscript only to be told to remove 15,000 words, then another 5,000 were removed in the editing dept. I must agree with the other reviews, the 'John Woo' stuff became tiresome very quickly. Bolan was constantly throwing himself in slow motion through the air whilst firing his full auto Desert Eagle and Beretta. I always assumed that one hit from a Desert Eagle would blow the bad guy away leaving only his smoking shoes. Not so here, Bolan shoots his target three times with the Eagle whilst in flight! Wow! And how does one reload when both hands are filled with pistols? I can only image that Bolan has been watching Lara Croft movies... And on a tiny, tiny nitpicking note, modern warships no longer have conning towers, and the Iranian navy most certainly does not have a battleship.

Quite a neutral story, neither great nor bad. There are some good action scenes involving Able Team, including Grimaldi swinging out of a helicopter onto a cargo plane. The Phoenix Force sequences didn't thrill me that much, and Bolan's was a typical shake the tree to see what falls out reaction. Big co-incidence where Bolan just happens to be in the general area when the bad guys start being bad guys. There seemed to be a chapter missing inbetween ch 23 and ch 24. We have Bolan shaking the tree to find the main kingpin, Bolan learns the location and then......we jump to ch 24 where Price gives a massive info dump about intel that Bolan has just learnt after locating and killing the kingpin! There were a further few little niggles, but nothing really worth noticing. So, it failed to excite, but it didn't bore.

Guest stars: Phoenix Force & Able Team A very different Mack Bolan story for once. This time Bolan has to use non lethal measures to protect US oil workers from angry natives, slippery French and nasty Japanese. Okay, there is a big shoot out at the end of the novel, and a minor one in the middle, but for the most part it was fists and rubber bullets. Definately a plesant change. The mission is a political one. Bolan is sent in to protect US oil workers, nut also to ensure that America gets drilling rights by pushing the French and Japanese out. This didn't really feel like a Stony mission, and I found it a little strange that Bolan regularly calls back to base to find out if the president still approves of his methods or not. But it was almost a perfect story, only losing one star for the most curious inclusion of Phoenix Force and Able Team. Submerged off the coast of the islands is the USS Sam Houston, a submarine that has been converted to a SEAL launch platform, and has several SEAL teams on board. When the time comes for Bolan to defend the US compound from the angry natives using non lethal methods he decides - for some unknown reason - to have PF & AT fly half way around the world (at great expense) to fire rubber bullets in the middle of the night before disappearing from the story (apart from Gadgets). What? Are the SEALS incapable of firing rubber bullets? Did the author feel that introducing a few new characters would tax the readers brain too much? I don't know what the reason was for this, but I found it to be more than a little silly. Still, it was a very good story and I found myself enjoying it more than I expected.

I found this book to be a dull and confusing mess. There was certainly the potential for a great storyline, but the plot just fizzled and died. Some of the problems have already been pointed out by other reviewers. Alisha Witt had a good introduction, but then she disappeared, only to appear at the end of the novel with a have baked plan and to get shot by Bolan. The Indian tribe really were used as patsies, they were just page filler, and the gunfight at the car yard it seemed that the 'injuns' just popped up only to fall down again like an old John Wayne western. The two main 'villains' weren't all that main. Although most of the novel focuses on them (Bolan really is just added as an afterthought) they are, in the end, nothing more than two bit hoodlums who want to make it to the big time, but seem incapable of pulling it off. At no time did I feel that these two were a credible threat. But my biggest problem is with the Stony Man crew themselves - and the massive co-incidences surrounding them. Brognola (who fades in and out of the story) is called in by an old friend who runs a defense firm. Brognola decides to call in Bolan - who can't handle the two hoodlums on his own - and then calls in Able Team - who contribute very little to the story, and then decides to call in a private detective to assist Bolan and friends, and this pi just happens to be an old friend of Barbara Price, who - for the first time ever - decides to go out into the field and help Brognola, Bolan, Lyons, Blancanales, Schwartz, Grimaldi, Kissenger and pi boyfriend on the ground. Price spends most of her time in a hotel room fretting or in getting captured by red injuns. SHe later happens to bump into two park rangers who also know Price by name, so it seems that Price lived in or grew up in the area, but this is either never mentioned by the author, or it was cut as unneeded background information. Also annoying was the authors ability to forget characters and injuries. The characters who were killed in the sports car in the beginning of the novel are never mentioned again, not even by the two bit hoodlums, and Bolan's injuries - being shot in the ribs at close range and having his leg run over by a motorbike are pretty soon forgotten. To cut a dull story short, this was a chore to get through, and I am unable to find anything good to say about Firepower.

I am sorry to say that this book failed to interest me. Having Bolan in the middle of an earthquake was a brilliant idea - I even love the title of this story - but as the story developed it seemed that the earthquake was all but forgotten, there was just no feeling of being in a disaster zone any more, it just turned into Bolan fighting two criminal groups in a warehouse and 'rattling cages' trying to get the missing girlfriend back. I think the lack of the 'disaster movie' feel was what disappointed me the most. The two enemy groups - the very real world Kongra-Gel and the Jandarma - quickly became the usual type cast characters that are often found in a Mike Newton novel. Again this was disappointing, the lack of real menace disappeared, being replaced by nameless thugs who stick their heads up for Bolan to shoot off. I don't want to dwell on the negative too much, there were many positive things in the story. Bolan was looking for stolen medical and relief supplies not a missing nuclear weapon, the military Jandarma and the PKK Kongra-Gel are real legal and illegal organisations. The city of Van does exist (a paragraph or two history lesson wouldn't have been amiss), and it really is a bad earthquake zone. Bolan is on a personnal mission - he does call for Stony Man assistance - which does make a change from the usual Brognola pointing his finger and saying "Attack". The only other minor negative point for me were the SGT Mercy scenes. They seemed to be forced in to pad the story a little. In what is a crowded city Bolan and Abood always seemed to be the only people for miles that could help. So an okay but average story, with an unusual setting, that didn't engage me. Seven stars for this one.

I have never been a fan of Carl Furst, and this novel has been sitting on my shelves for some 19 years, unread. So I was quite surprised when reading it on vacation by how much it exceeded my low expectations. It is more of a espionage novel than a normal novel, the few fire fights did seem to be tacked on, but I had the feeling that the author was trying to emmulate a Robert Ludlum adventure than copy a regular Bolan mission. There are lots of European locations - I found the Dutch locations to be particulary good - and the entire mission takes about a month, which allows plenty of time for travel and recovey from wounds. The novel hasn't aged well, it is set firmly in the Cold War, lots of borders between countries (including an inaccurate one between Belgium and Holland) and Check Point Charlie is mentioned several times. There is a massive cast of characters, sometimes too many, I did keep forgeting which Sir Humphrey was which, and which Italian was which. Sometimes the author confused Bolan with a regular FBI/CIA type agent. Several times there was mention of characters that Bolan had 'put away' and Bolan even bumped into one of these jail birds in Amsterdam. I can only out it down to Furst's unfamiliarity with the character. But on the whole I enjoyed it. Well done, Carl Furst.

I am going to go against the grain here and say that this book was a poor entry in the series. To start with it is almost a non mission. Phoenix Force are assigned to replace the Secret Service in protecting the President because the Secret Service are a bunch a layabout buffons incapable of tying their own shoelaces let alone protect POTUS. They lounge around reading books and making dispairing comments about Phoenix Force but when the push comes to the shove PF have to save the president whilst the Secret Service nap (and Calvin does this by running out of the back door of the White House, running around half the streets of DC and eventually sneeking up on the lone gunman. The Secret Service snipers on the roof of the White House and all the surrounding buildings obviously had a day off). Although this story was written before The West Wing became popular I still find vanCook's lack of knowledge and researh of Pennsylvania Avenue suprising. The only good point is that PF once again are operating inside the USA. Able Team are given a boring assignment of looking for a Thermal Detonator hiding in a bar in Texas. AT spend half the novel trying to get into the good books of a local sleezebag instead of interrogating the guy straight away. Lots of padding takes place including the dull rescue of a group of blacksuits sealed in oil barrels at the bottom of a lake. Bolan has the more interesting mission as he takes down a militia and later negotiates with the leader of another militia. This for me was the highlight of the novel. The authors fears and fetishes are rampant. The fear of computers is obvious: "Take a look at that demon machine....I'm still not convinced that computers aren't the anti-christ." page 258 and "my cyberteam....run periodic spot checks of the internet." page 17. The author's knife obsession is to be found regularly. All knives are lovingly described and I was waiting for the characters to start stroking and talking to these weapons. And then there was the politics. I can hazard a guess and say that the author is a die hard Republican. All of the characters that had a political opinion had a Republican opinion. Written at a time when Clinton was in the White House, the author not only goes out of his way to ridicule the then current administration, but has several characters - Including McCarter - voice thoughts that the president was rubbish and should be replaced. Lyons I can accept but after the fifth character expressed their feelings I had had enough. To end it all I would say that the characters and their motivations were paper thin, especially Desmond Click. Very poor make it up as you go along plotting. And to end the disappointment the author has the villains either murder each other or commit suicide. Very dull stuff. Only 4 stars for this novel.

The devil may care, but I certainly didn't. The book had a huge marketing campaign, it sold 44,000 copies in 4 days in Britain alone. The success almost certainly guarantees more Bond novels. DMC recieved rave reviews in the press. All of this is good news, yet I didn't enjoy it as much as I had hoped. To start with, Sebastian Faulks is viewed by many as the best author since Charles Dickens. I have never read anything else by him so I cannot comment on that, but it did give me high expectations for the book. And with that I was let down. The mission takes between The Man with the Golden Gun and Colonel Sun, 1967 or 1968 thus, but there was very little to give the novel a sixties feel. The odd reference was made to telegraph messages in hotels and the Soviets, but the rest of the story could very easily be contemporary. But my main critisism lies with the plot. Faulks puts very little effort into being original. Sections are lifted from the novel Goldfinger (observing the villain by accident before being given the mission, playing tennis (instead of golf) with the villain and using his cheating methods against him, henchmen being sucked out of aircraft windows) and lifted from the films (hates Britain (Goldeneye) and wants to start a war between Britain and Russia (Tomorrow Never Dies). There were many other little things and it all added up to a very thin plot. It doesn't suprise me that the publishers kept the plot secret for so long, there was nothing to give away! And to top it all, the heroin angle just vanishes altogether in the third part of the book. So all in all this was an average 007 mission that was over hyped. It isn't a bad book, but given the publicity and the caliber of the author it should have been a lot better. I can only hope that the next continuation novel is written by Lee Child or Ken Follet.

Special guest star: David McCarter (briefly)I am really split on this story. Some areas I enjoyed, other areas were a major let down.The good bits: Hey, I have been turned into a Lord of the Realm. Lord William Glen-Patrick: adventurer and womaniser and sometimes rolling in money. Cool!For the first time ever (to the best of my knowledge) Bolan visits Wales! I have been waiting for that since 1985! Okay, it is only a brief stop in Cardiff for a shoot out, but something is better than nothing.I enjoyed the trek across the Sahara. This was probably the highpoint of the story for me. The weaker bits: Once again, as always with a Chuck Rogers story, there is no regard for distance and time. Bolan hops all around the world and it seemed that the villains just waited around for Bolan to show up.The cast of characters is huge. Bolan ended up with around 15 to 20 hangers-on. Theses cardboard cutouts were picked up and dropped off (and sometimes forgotten about) in almost every chapter. Of course they all die in the end (which was more often than not needless) and it became tiresome to remember who was who. The cardboards were also extremely shallow. When Lord William loses his two favourite dogs, he barely even notices. When Lunk dies he barely notices (no mention after the firefight - so who owns the company now? Pope just disappeared from the pages). When Yuliya Tymosh's companion dies she doesn't notice - in fact Tymosh was supposed to with Bolan from Cardiff, yet she is almost completely ignored during the African trek and barely puts in an appearence up until her death in the Middle East. So the characterisation in this novel annoyed me a great deal.Lord William was so typecast it was unbelievable. He was what Americans imagine English lords to be like and has very little bearing on reality, kind of like the image that all Americans are cowboys and do nothing but shoot each other and say Yee-Haw all day).Stolen nuke of the week. The mad mullah as villain. Yawn.The sand in my eye: This little bit really irritated me. In the first part of the book Bolan is in England, Wales and Ireland, and the characters (all of them) constantly said things like "English army" and "English isles". The word that you were looking for Mr Rogers is "British" as in British Isles and British army. I am surpised that the Canadian editors didn't pick this up, they should know better. Canada is now banned from the Commonwealth as a consequence ;p.So, sorry, but I didn't find this Chuck Rogers story to be as good as previous entries by the same author (it is his own fault, he set the benchmark too high), hence 7 stars.

Oh was this good. Chuck Rogers shows that he hasn't lost his touch in writing thrilling action adventure novels with his first Stony Man entry. Wall to wall action, non stop adventure, Able Team get the sh*t kicked out of them, Phoenix Force get beaten and bloodied, Stony Man Farm look as if they will fail on a mission for once, with devasting consequences, Akira gets horrifically tortured, Bolan makes a guest appearance, bullets, explosions and destruction. I had to stop reading just to draw breath!! Well done, Chuck. And yet...and yet only nine stars. Why? Well, there were some strange editorial oversights throughout the book which sometimes made confusing reading. On p39 McCarter morphed into Manning then back into McCarter. In the final oil rig fight, Bolan's gun changed from a Beretta to Barrett and back to a Beretta. And don't even try to understand the computer stuff on p131, it was complete nonsense. It was a 'nuke of the week'story, but this time it wasn't bombs but charges that were the main weapon. One of the villains, Clay Forbes, seemed identical to Michael Brand from Chuck Rogers' Savage Game. And the book finished on a dime, no mention was made of Brognola, Gadgets or even Franka Marx. But even with these little flaws I still really enjoyed it.

TIA. This Is Africa. And Africa is anarchy when there is a civil war. I couldn't disagree with Chuck's review more. There were no clear cut villains because there never are in a civil war. And the information that Bolan was trying to retrieve wasn't important, I suspect that the author was tipping his hat to the film Ronin. The mercenary leader, James du Toit - recently release from a prison in New Guinea - is obviously modelled on real life mercenary Nick du Toit currently serving a life sentence in Equitorial Guinea, and shows that the author did do some real research on this novel and not pull ideas out of his hat. Bolan, after making a foolish mistake (never play with your cell phone when your enemies are live and kicking) gets badly wounded and almost dies. Only Jack Grimaldi saves him after a daring and over the odds rescue. I imagine that after the punishment that he took, Bolan will be out of action for at least a couple of months. So it was a well written story, but a few little things niggled me. The first one was that Bolan didn't always feel like Bolan, he was at times more reminisant of Sylvester Stallone's version of Rambo. It wasn't anything definate, just my impression whilst reading. The second niggle was that the author painted Venezuela as the country that wanted to get hold of Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction (or what ever it was in the building in Ghana. Yellow Cake lab?) and I find that to be a little implausable. Venezuela tends to be painted as a 'rogue nation' by Fox News and the White House because president Chavez is anti USA with regards to oil. Here I had the impression that the author was banging the Fox News drum for whatever reason, and this didn't sit quite right in this novel. Still, it was a good story, and I am sure that Nathan Meyer's Executioner stories will improve even more in the future.

I found it an okay read, but it wasn't great. The main good points were revisiting a few characters that haven't been seen in a while (Val and Johnny) and having Bolan go off on a solo mission, something that occurs infrequently. Bolan heads into the Congo to recover a young lad that Val holds dear, one Patrick Quinn, a young man that has gotten in over his head with a doomsday cult. What ensues is a simple story of pursuit and ambush through the jungle. So far so good. The problem is that this is really an Executioner with lots of padding. Mike Newton tries to put thoughts into the characters heads, but each little voice sounds the same, whether it is coming from Bolan or any other character. The thoughts just ramble on about nothing. I found myself skip reading paragraphs of it to get back to the story. But I liked the story, even if it didn't always feel like it was set in a jungle. Even if the characters were a bit shallow, and main villain Gaborone didn't seem to charasmatic. And then Mike Newton went and ruined it with a cheap cop out. He has to get Bolan back to the village for the obligatory gunfight at the end where the baddies get killed, and to do that he has Quinn say something along the lines of "By the way, I didin't tell you before, but Gaborone has an atom bomb." And there we have it, the nuke of the week. How unoriginal. A nuke that Gaborone bought from some unknown Russian so that he could sell it on to a cardboard Columbian or a typecast Arab. Unlike the back cover blurb, there is no race to stop the detonation, Gaborone is going to sell it to one of the two buyers and wait to see what they do with it. How I disklike the nuke of the week stories (even though I knew that it was going to happen, I was still disappointed when it did). So that peice of creative thinking really knocked it back for me and that is why I am scoring this story so low. * To say nothing of the strange editorial oversight on pages 312 and 316. Bolan kills Kwabena on page 312, yet the guy is suddenly still alive on 316! Either Bolan's knife was blunt, or the author or the editors exchanged one characters name for another.

I enjoyed this story, and there I was expecting it to be overrated and find myself disappointed with it. There were a few minor niggles and I'll get to them in a moment, but they were minor.The real shocker in this novel is that there is actual character development here, the villains Yarborough and Joan van der Meer (spelt the correct Dutch way) were interesting, although their boss, Senator Walden was a bit stereotypical. Another suprising thing was that Mack Bolan seemed to hardly feature, so much story line is takingp place at other locations that Bolan just misses out on it all. In fact, Bolan at times seemed to have been slotted in for the requisite firefights. I had the feeling that this was a Stony Man novel sans AT and PF. Kissinger featured, and ended up in hospital badly wounded. Buck Greene makes a return with his blacksuit team, and Buck also ends up wounded. So lots of good things happening.But I got the feeling that this was a SuperBolan constrained in a tight cover. By page 200 I was wondering how all the loose ends would be tied up. They were tied up, but in a very short manner. Also somebody was doing a hatchet job in the editing dept. I know and understand that the word count needs to brought down but to remove the middle of a conversation is just plain silly. It happened in a few places, check out the bottom of page 201 to the top of 202. I guess the police detective was chatting with unheard voices in his head. I also got a little lost with the sub characters in the militia groups. A few times I was left wondering who was who.But it was a good Executioner novel.

On sheer enjoyment value I have to give this novel a 10. This is the best GE novel that I have read in a long time. I found it hard to put down in the evening, and breezed through it in three or four sittings. Yes, the overall plot is standard - bad guys have biological weapons and are going to release them in US cities - but the way the story was written was enthralling. Able Team had the most to do, and were fortunate to be in the vicinity (oh, the co-incidence) when a Russian nuclear sub grounds itself by a small US town. The rescue teams decent into the burning sub is one of the most intense sequences in the book, and from then on I was hooked. Able Teams stand off with the two Spetznaz soldiers at the greasy spoon massacre was equally tense, as was Phoenix Forces decent into the catacombs of the monastry. And, Alan Philipson makes use of Greenich Mean Time, EDT and PDT for most of his chapters, which means that the reader can see exactly how long it takes PF to get from London to Georgia, or how long the Greasy Spoon massacre took. Brilliant. It really is a shame that this is Alan Philipsons last GE novel. Minor quibbles - the nuclear submarine was supposed to be a new design, yet nobody seemed particularly excited (the Americans) or upset (the Russians) that it was grounded. No Red October stuff here. Also the villains seemed a little thin and their motivations and plot a little vague. Yes they wanted the Cold War back again, but to sacrifice yourself and never ever see if you were succesful didn't quite seem right. But otherwise it was a gret book.

For me this story was average. It really was average. The plot wasn't anything special, Arab terrorist have stolen two nuclear backback bombs and are planning to set them off in two US cities. Mack has to stop them. That's it. No twists or turns or suprises, just a paint by numbers story that probably was a regular Executioner, but because the typeset was double the normal size, the crafty staff of Gold Eagle managed to turn it into a SuperBolan (that's my theory). The characters themselves were cardboard. The Arab terrorists were flat and bland and had no background whatsoever. Their only motivation was to be wicked. Bolan was equally flat and bland, change his name and he could have been FBI agent of the week. There was nothing that marked him out as The Executioner. What was stiking was the complete abscence of Phoenix and Able. Only Bolan and a team of nameless faceless blacksuits were assigned. I found it strange ehat the two teams were not mentioned once. It was as if the author was unaware of their existence. So just a bland story. Nothing to get excited about and nothing to feel too disappointed about either. I thought that the snake pit fight was okay, but that was it.

Special Guest Star: Gary Manning Location: Canada, but involves lots of jumping around. Yep, its a Chuck Rogers. Always a single Phoenix Force member holding Bolan's hand and always lots of location shifting with no regard to time and distance. Standard trade marks for Chuck. I did enjoy it and it is up to Chuck Rogers usual standards (although it doesn't reach the dizzying heights of Savage Game). It is cool to see some regualr, standard villains for a change, this time the French Canadian Union Corse, with a bit of the old Italian Mafia thrown in. The plague was well handled and I enjoyed followng Bolan's investigation and adventures throughout Canada, a country that Bolan rarely visits. I liked the good guys, I liked the bad guys, I liked the plot, although it isn't explained why an old Russian scientist would be working for the Union Course, some character development there would have been nice. The only let down was the involvement of the North Koreans at the end, that seemed to be a bit of a cop out and pandering to George Bush's 'Axis of Evil' to get people to buy the book (this was written before NK started to detonate nuclear test weapons. But something was wrong. Something kept this story from being a perfect Bolan adventure. That something was its length. I had the feeling that this was a SuperBolan trying to burst free of its thin Executioner cover. Scenes were often choppy and some chapters just jarred painfully. My case in point would be the jump from chapter nine to ten. The girl gets captured by the bad guys (how original) at the end of chapter nine. Ten starts with Bolan, hours later (because he left her to get some sleep) kicked out of the RCMP (why? no explaination) and is out to find her by attacking the Italian Mafia. He enlists the help of a doctor who is two hours away by air travel. Chapter 11 the has the doctor sitting in the car next to Bolan, after presumably spending at least an hour getting to a plane, flying back to Montreal, and spending another hour teaming up with Bolan and getting out on location. So after all this time has been wasted Bolan eventually rescues the girl, just in the nick of time! This is covered in three very short chapters that left me feeling that somebody either taken a red pen to huge sections of the manuscript or Mr Rogers was in a real rush to get it all finished. Not very satisfying. There were also several editorial errors. To highlight two, on page 110 Mack is refered to as 'the executioner' whilst on page 131 Manning is refered to as 'gummer'. All very strange. The ending on the submarine I found a little disappointing. As pointed out in another review there was no mention made of Big Damage (who never got to duke it out with Mack) and it seemed a little weird that Consolata Malatesta was present. She didn't need to be despite the rubbish explantion that Bolan gives. She could have returned in another story, Chuck! This was a wasted character!! So it was good, and I enjoyed it, it was just marred by some silly mistakes and not enough forethough on the authors part.

I have to say that I found this story to be okay, but no more than that. It was typical a typical cookie cutter, there are bad guys up to no good, so Bolan runs around attacking the different factions, building up a massive body count, until he takes out the villain in the final pages. And that is it. Oh there is a plot in there, really, and it is just screaming to get out. If it had been utilised properly, if a little more thought had gone into the writing, then this would have been a really good action novel. Unfortunately it gets smothered by all the shotting that pads out the novel. And it is a lot of padding. So lets see, the bad guys want to rule Cuba, and to do this they need a massive army consisting of ex-KGB guys, mercenaries, drug dealers, and even local hired help. Yet by the end of the book they are down to a quater of their original number yet still have no problem in getting to Castro. So what purpose did the other 3/4 fill? Target practice for Mack, thats all. Very disappointing. And why did they need two Russian V/TOL's for? Bolan destroys both planes, and they are not even missed. So it was a wasted plot. Which is a shame because it could have been so much better. And unless I am really dense, I always believed that admirals belong in the navy, not generals, unless the Cuban military is very very different to the rest of the world (like I said I could be dense) And I am sure that the word lite switch doesn't exist and neither does eyesite, both of which our eagle eyed editors missed.

I really do not know what to make of this one. To start with Bolan is barely in it, he is sidelined and when he does appear he is lead around by supporting characters like a dog on a leash. The only time he really seemed to be the Executioner was when he crashed the porno makers and the drug dealers. Unfortunately this was only a few pages of action and nothing was doen with it afterwards. So it wasn't really a Bolan story. But even with Bolan out of the equation it was still a jumbled mess. The long cast list reads like the end credits of a Hollywood movie, but even with all these people the story still isn't there. So we are supposed to believe that a tv preacher has arranged that some cultists sacrifice a few teenagers so that the preacher can preach about evil from the pulpit? Yes folks, that is the wicked plan of the week. The rock band are just a cover, the police are incompetent, the private eye who recruits Bolan after talking to Brognola seems to do nothing other than talk about the situation and "call in markers". Cassandra serves no other purpose that to get captured. Oh was I bored with it. I know I moan about wanting to see Bolan return to his roots and tackle local and organised crime instead on the run of the mill 'Mohammed with a nuke' story, but please don't bore me to death with it. Bolan is meant to be action. Lethal Weapon and Die Hard all rolled into one. This was more like Sleeping with the Enemy, with the emphasis on sleeping. Mike Newton has written some gems, The Trial and Run to Ground amongst them, and he now regularly turns out cookie cutter novels. This was possibly an experiment to try something different. In my eyes it didn't work very well. A top heavy cast of characters and a paper thin plot didn't help at all. Not one that I will read again.

It is a Chuck Rogers novel. You know automatically several things. These would be:-a) It will have excellent action sequencesb) It will have a good storyc) Bolan will have the whosis kicked out of himd) The villains will be extreme meaniese) The story will flow very fastf) The odd character from Phoenix Force will make a guest appearenceThese are all good points and are characteristic of Chuck's novels. Night of the Knives has lots of excellent moments and villains, though the bad guys are no where near as good as those in the famous Savage Game. But it was a good story and I enjoyed it.There are of course the negative points, for me just two. The first is my usual moan about Chuck's novels. Yes, youvé guessed it, Time and Distance. Mr Rogers always seems to have a problem is stating how long something is between two points. Bolan is one moment in Africa, the next in Stony Man Farm, then back to Africa, then to Argentina (Bounos Aires) then to northen Argentina. How long was the adventure. We are told at one point that the US Embassy was attacked twice in one week only to be told a few pages later that both instances were last week. Bolan sometimes takes days to recover from his wounds, but how many fall along the wayside, and the villains are just waiting around for Bolan to show up. Always the same problem, Mr Rogers. Time and Distance.But there was the African side to the story and here I missed something. Maybe I was so excited by all the action that I missed a paragraph. Maybe I just blinked and missed it. Maybe an over-excited editor armed with a pair of sissors got carried away. Or maybe it just wasn't there to begin with. My problem is why was one of the top bad guys (Fredi) doing hanging around with a Nigerian criminal and handing out the ceremonial daggers (welcome to the Los Falcons Club) when the African "...didn't even show up on the Stony Man radar." I just didn't get it. Sorry Mr Rogers. Did I miss something? Other than serving as a springboard to the Argentinian side of the story I just couldn't figure out why the "master race" would recruit Africans into their organisation.But otherwise I enjoyed the story. It was a good one.

It has often been said that The Executioner novels no longer sell as well as they used to. And after reading this hogwash it is understandable as to why the series is sliding. In this day and age people would like to read novels that are technically accurate - Tom Clancy started this trend with The Hunt for Red October - and even if an author doesn't know the ins and outs of a certain subject then the internet and all of its resources is only a few mouse clicks away. Except that Jerry vanCook has a phobia about computers and I shall explain why later on. But where do I start with this mess? On the plus side there were some good locations used, the story moves from Iran to Croatia to Djibouti, and if Jerry says that this statue is there then I tend to believe him. After all, a Lonely Planet book is easy to get hold of. So that was the plus. And now for the minuses, and boy are there a lot of them. And I mean a lot. I don't think I will even go into them all, but these are the ones that stick in my mind:- Weapons: Mack Bolan uses a knife in his day to day work. Jerry van Cook likes knives, as you can find out on his website. But when the author goes on and on and on about a particular knife then it becomes old really fast. The "Baghdad Bullet" is introduced on page 59 and is mentioned on every other page for the entire book. I lost track of the number of times that Bolan sticks it under the throats of police officers, taxi drivers, hotel workers, renegade scientists, sailors etc. Seriously it is used that often. Jerry gave Bolan a real fetish in this novel. I have no wish to buy shares in the manufacturing company, and to use the book as an advert seemed a bit off. Boring: That sums up the story. It seemed to be a regular Executioner that was padded and padded and padded. The 'Renegade'in the book is a scientist called Anton Sobor. Just a regular bad guy who is selling nasty weapons to other bad guys. He has no special skills. And yet he gets away from Bolan not once, not twice but three times. And each time Bolan goes after him following flimsy clues, travelling around Iran with near impunity, only to miss the guy again. And I do mean miss with a Desert Eagle. The repartition was dull. Allies: I was reminded reading this book of computer games where you as a character have to recruit npc's to join you in a quest to do whatever. You would pick these npc's up in bars and taverns and they were always easy to find. And so it was here. Bolan recruits a NYPD cop who happens to be Iranian who happens to be on vacation in his old home village which happens to be on Bolan's travel and Bolan meets him after he happens upon his grandfather and....yawn. Needless to say this NYPD cop joins Bolan's quest, is a mind reader because he knows exactly what Bolan is thinking, and then ends up getting killed because the author has painted himself into a hole where only the introduction of another character will help the story along. So one dies and Bolan picks up another ally one page later. Good grief! And not forgetting that Bolan also picked up a Russian merc as an ally when extra firepower was needed, but he got killed off the moment that he was no longer needed. Killing off allies when they are no longer needed is really lazy story telling, and bugs me no end. Locations: So I liked the locations that Jerry used. But the people that he painted on to these locations were terrible. All Iranians are corrupt, although Bolan 'suspects' that there might be one or two good ones. All Iranians drive classic American automobiles with engines that are as loved as a baby and there is almost no difference between a terrorist and an Iranian police officer. The Croatians are portrayed as complete idiots, they all know exactly the same phrase in English and that is all they know. But otherwise they are grinning buffoons. And I don't think I'll bother with telling you how Jerry treats the Djiboutians. Party Politics: The afore mentioned Tom Clancy is a great one for forcing his version of politics down the readers throat and Jerry does his best here as well. I gathered that Jerry votes Republican because of several things. And not only because Americans are the only geniuses and the rest of the world is populated by idiots as in this book. It seems that the current president "the cowboy from Texas" really means what he says and the entire world is trembling in their boots whenever he appears on tv and the previous president was oh so weak and lame. I mean, please, do you really think that countries like Syria and Iran and others are really so worried about an American invasion after the mess that is Iraq. And the whole book's premise is based on that concept. And then of course there was the incident when Anton Sobor mentions that Iraq was only invaded for the oil and not for 'freedom', only to be threatened with violence by the NYPD cop. Why? Does another view of the 'truth' hurt? Djibouti: Issa's and Afars hate each other and have been fighting since the year dot. True. But I had to laugh when Chief Asab is worried that his country will be next on America's invasion list. Um, Jerry, there are already 5,000 US Marines based in Djibouti and they have been there since 2001. Yet no mention is made of the massive military base which is situated right next to the airport which figured so prominently in your story. But that is just me nitpicking. Sorry. Computers: Ah, the best for last. "I only know that Satan lives inside them" Page 327. I had a feeling that Jerry was expressing his on views on computers. Because by the time I had read page 330 I really wanted to drop kick the book out the window. The only thing stopping me was the fact that I paid for the book and the cover was still so nice and shiny. So let me explain my peev here. Bolan comes across the villains computer which is an old Compaq from 1996 (ah, a Pentium 75 MHz, I know them well). The language is in Arabic, which Bolan has to have translated. So far so good. Then Bolan comes across a file that is password protected. Since Bolan has two left hands when it comes to computer he phones his old friend Bear. And now for the amazing parts. The second goof is that Bear learns of the password, and tells Bolan it, the password is in ENGLISH, yet if Bolan was reading ARABIC then the KEYBOARD would be set to ARABIC as well, so how did BEAR and BOLAN manage that? (No mention was made of giving the info to the translating npc who then typed it in). But the primary goof was how the Bear discovered the password. The computer wasn't connected to a modem, so Bear has Bolan tell him the make and model of the pc and then WITHOUT OPENING THE COMPUTER, Bolan reads out the serial number and date of manufacture of the HARD DISK! Apparently Bear then knows enough to figure out the password!!!!! F**king Amazing!! I really want to know how to do that! I wouldn’t need to use little programs like password spy then! Learn passwords from the serial number of the hard drive! It boggles the mind. Okay, I'll admit it. I really didn't like this book. Really I didn't. Not one that I will ever read again. And remember, if you ever forget your password then just send Jerry the hard drive serial number. He'll know what to do with it.

I must admit that I am finding hard to review this book. I found it so nuetral that I neither liked it nor disliked it. There were some good points, like the ones that Terry mentioned in his review, as well as some good locations, and not to forget the whopping battle on the glacier. But the book felt so bland. Bolan was an automaton, following other people around blindly rather than leading. Other characters were cardboard, both the good guys and the bad. The body count was so far over the top that it was just boring. And then there is Frogman's point. Stony Man have never heard of The Council. And yet every Tom, Dick and Harry in India had. I found that a little hard to believe. What I also found hard to believe was that all eleven of the Council leaders would be hanging around a base in the middle of nowhere just waiting for something to happen, such as the far fetched 'take over the Kremlin and we will control all of Russia' plot. So all in all, just plain, just average. Dan Schmidt has written worse, but he has written far better.

It is always easier to criticise a book then it is to praise it. At least it is for me. I seem to have an unfortunate tendancy to pick holes. And I did pick a few in this story. Not that this was a bad book - far from it - but I'll get to the minus points later. First the good. Like other reviewers have already said, all of the characters get airplay in Doom Prophecy. Which is a major suprise. All too often one of the teams (usually Able) are given little to do or characters are completely forgotten as if they never existed. Here we see all of them shine. Past adventures are mentioned, previous terrorist attacks on Pearl Harbour, Kassandra's research into Phoenix Force, Mott's mention of Able relationship with the Executioner. All of PF and AT are wounded by the end of the adventure, all suffer from gunshot wounds, knife wounds, broken bones or all three. Again too often the characters walk away without a scratch, this time they need to be carried off in stretchers. One can only hope that nothing happens whilst the boys are recovering. Carmen Delahunt gets some action and temas up with AT. The ex-FBI lady doesn't actually get to shoot anybody, but she is there on the ground with Able. I would have liked to have seen a little more time spent on her, but I guess that there wasn't room in this story. The niggles: There wasn't really anything bad about this novel, just things that niggled or jarred. The most jarring and irritating was the cliffhangers. Every other paragraph seemed to end on a cliffhanger - one of the guys is about to get it, eg McCarter is about to get shot, and the story would jump away to Gadgets and he is about to be blown up and then we would jump to Enzico and he is about to be stabbed and then we would jump to Kurtzman and his pc is going to crash and then we would jump back to McCarter who survives but then Hawkins is about to die before we jump to Lyons who saves Gadgets and so on and so on. It took me eight or nine days to read the book, and I found myself constantly flick back through the pages to see what was happening and where. This slowed the story somewhat. Another niggle that ties in with the one above is the action. Yes it is an action adventure story, but the adventure tends to get lost in the pages. Begining with chapter two PF and AT open fire and don't stop shooting until the last page. All very well and good, but there is very little in between. Personally I would have liked to see something else besides constant shoot-reload-shoot. Some car chases, helicopter chases, daring-do and a little less bang-bang-your-dead. But that is just me. I also found it a shame that all the shooting tended to get in the way of the character development of the villains. Just where did Kassandra develop her computer skills, how did she come to be adopted and who were her adopted parents, what was her precise relationship with her criminal step brother and why did he want to risk his criminal enterprise to help her on her quest for revenge? How did they find Aghul (who was a great villain who also wasn't as developed as he could have been)? Where did they get all these terrorist mercenaries from? The Teams make leaps of deduction that are always correct. Can't they be wrong even once? Everytime we had a character say "I think that it is this" then it would be so. It happened several time in the novel and became a little tedious after the third or fouth time. Like Monsta Mack, I sometimes found the action to be a little unclear, certainly during the close quarter fights. Something would be half described or just appear leaving me wondering where it came from. The most confusing fight that I came across was with Able Team and the Gremlin, Snake and the Giant at the arms expo. How big the building was and where everything was was often hazy. Knives and guns: Mr Wojtowicz likes both and often goes into excruciating detail over each weapon. Which is fine in moderation, but by the time the sixth manufacturer of a knife is described it becomes a little boring and I found myself skipping that paragraph. Yes a combat knife is sharp and a gun shoots bullets, but too much description does tend to slow the story. Not really a niggle but I saw that Riddley Mott had time to be racist and insulting to everyone with the notable exception of Calvin James. After calling Pol 'spick and wetback' and finding equally insulting names for other members of the Stony Man teams, he had nothing left for old Calvin. I had the feeling here that Douglas was trying hard not to step on anybodies toes, which felt strange after all the other utterances that Mott spouted off. But, and it is a big but, despite all these little flaws it must be remembered that the various authors have a deadline of three months to complete a Stony Man, a feat that takes a main stream author a year or two. So in the face of this incredibly tiny deadline, DOug has done extremely well with his first Stony Man. Well Done!

This is a book of two parts. The first involves a jungle SAR, the second is the standard assault the bad guys base and rescue the girl and missing secrets. The first part I enjoyed the most. Bolan and McCarter are sent on a search and rescue mission, something that hardly evers happens in the Bolan book range. They are plonked down in the middle of a jungle with only the equipment that they can carry, and so have to recover a missing superplane and its pilots. Needless to say there are bad guys, in the form of Indonisian soldiers, that chase the Stony Man team through the jungles of Papua New Guinea. Good stuff! Having failed completely in the first part of the novel, the now reinforced Stony Man team mount an assault on the bad guys HQ to recover destroy the superplane and rescue the surviving pilot. They half succeed, Grimaldi fortunately knows how to fly advanced state of the art superplanes (learnt from reading the manual I suspect) and so flys it off to Australia. The rest of the team are left hunting for the missing ppilot, only to learn that she is a prisoner on a slow ship to Japan. So an assault is launched, using a nuclear submarine, the pilot is rescued, the ship sinks and everybody is happy. Well, almost. Although it wasn't a bad story, and Patrick Rogers writes well, there were several minor points that didn't sit right. To start with, this is really a 'Stony Man' novel. It is more a SuperBolan, with Stony Man providing support. Both Phoenix and Able are split up, one four members of PF participate in the mission and only one from AT. And speaking of AT, Pol Blancanales does not exist, he isn't mentioned once, not even when Price gives a roll call in the beginning of the story. Another point was towards the end of the novel. The information about the submarine was inaccurate, for example, if they were running in 'passive mode' then they are hardly likely to raise the periscope and leave a large wake indicating where they are. Equally, sonar is always passive, the 'ping' is only used occasionally to judge distances. I had the feeling the Mr Rogers had watched one too many cheap Hollywood films where subs always go "ping ping ping". There where other little things throughout the book, but at the moment they slip my mind (apart from what happened to the laser that shot the Skylance down, and does Tanaka return in Blood of the Earth?). Shows how little they were. (as a little correction point, one character is called Marie Van Heyn. She should have been Marie van Heyn (or Heijn). The 'van' is always lowercase and 'translates as 'from'). But overal I enjoyed the novel.

A very action packed tale of revenge and destruction. Victor Baibakov returns from his adventures in Death Whisper to wreck havoc on wartorn Bosnia. Only The Executioner stands in his way.The locations were wonderfully described, and the action scenes were truely excellent, proving that Chuck Rogers really is one of the top Gold Eagle Bolan authors. I really enjoyed the novel, finishing it within two days.Except.....Chuck Rogers makes his usual mistake (okay it is his third book, but he repeats the mistake in several later novels) and that is time and distance. Sometimes I had the feeling that I was watching 24 where Jack Bauer can cross from LA to Mexico and back again within a few hours. Bolan does the same here. He starts out in Bosnia, jumps to America, crisscrosses the USA, jumps to the Baltic, swims in the Baltic, then back to Bosnia for the final shootout. How much time has passed? A week? A month? We are never really told, Bolan is always one step behind Baibakov, always manages to guess where Baibakov will show up next (or somebody else guesses for him) and arrives in the nick of time. And Baibakov and his Red Falcon henchmen also seem to be able to cross continents effortlessly. This sort of temporal travel does begin to grate when it is used continuously.Baibakov's miraculous return isn't explained. He somehow survives Death Whisper and manages to escape to Bosnia. How we are not told.But it was still a good story. Unfortunately my copy was very second hand, falling to pieces so it is being sent for recycling.

Gold Eagle authors fall into three different catagories. 1. There are those that really care about what they write, care about giving the characters something different to do and to experience, and enjoy writing an adventure story. 2. There are those that treat the series as a 9 to 5 job, not really putting in much effort, and are gone at clocking out time. 3. There are those that wouldn't know a storyline, character or adventure if one of the authors from group one walked up and handed it to them. Mike Newton falls into catagory 2. He can write well, there is no denying that. He does research his locations, although little things slip through from time to time (Greeks use Euro's not Drachma since 2000, and this was written in 2002/03 ;) ) BUT he constantly uses templates for his stories. I thought that he blew it with Warrior's Requiem, where he could have sent out Katz on a high, he didn't. And with this story being the Revenge of Katz, he could have written another knockout novel. But he didn't. To quote the back cover "Mack Bolan has a score to settle,". Yes, and it is a shame that this never really emerged. What we had instead was a photocopy of other larger Bolan books such as Vendetta and Blood Debt. Bolan and friends wander around the globe shooting and shooting and shooting but never really getting anywhere. They a) attack a terrorist camp in Israel, capture a prisoner and with the flimsiest of clues fly off to b) The Bekka Valley where they attack a terrorist camp, find the flimsiest of clues (which they didn't need, common sense should have prevailed) and fly off to c) Macao, where they attack a villain's mansion, capture a prisoner, learn a flimsy clue and fly off to d) Jakarta, where they attack a villains office building, capture a prisoner, learn a flimsy clue and e) fly to the private island of a villain, attack the island and manage to kill all the villains - one for Bolan, one for McCarter and one for Mindel. I bet that if I were to re-read Vendetta or Blood Debt I would find an identical number of location jumps with identical villains and identical vague motives. So this really is a cut and paste template, and a waste of time to read. The one thing that I really did like was the fact that Bolan and friends had to buy their weapons on location, and not fly around with their signature guns. I sincerely hope that I never read another story that guest stars the wooden Rebecca Mindel again, but seeing as I never intend to buy another Mike Newton there is little chance of that - hurray. I have another six or seven Newtons sitting on my shelf that I will some time read, but for now I am sticking to catagory A authors.

I'll divide this book into two parts. It makes it easier to review. Part one: The general story is the standard Mike Newton template. There is absolutely no difference between this story and most other novels that he has written. Read the one and you have read them all, with a few notable exceptions. But considering that this is book 300 Mike Newton really blew his chance to write something different. Is there the usual mix of terrorists, all joining together? Check: Arabs, Chinese, Greeks and corrupt Americans. Does Mack go around various targets rattling cages (shoot first ask questions later)? Check. Does Mack shoot up an office to scare a villain, using a snipers rifle? Check. Does the girl get captured and Mack launches a full assault to get her back? Check. And so on and so forth. Really nothing new. I think that it is a real shame that Newton was offered number 300 only because of a 'tradition' of writing 100 and 200. I hope that when 400 rolls around another author is offered the chance to do something different. Part Two. I learnt that a major Stony Man character was going to bite the dust six or eight months before the book was released. I wasn't told which character it would be, but I knew that it would be Katz, simply because he was the most expendable. Since his 'retirement’ in another Mike Newton novel Katz had little or nothing to do, so it was really obvious to me that Katz would go. Katz had been around since 1982, and considering that he was a vintage character you would expect him to go out with a bang. I have never been a Katz fan, but I would have expected that. Did it happen? No. Mike Newton was asked to write 300, he used his standard template and tacked the Katz sub-story onto it. The premise that we are given is that Katz was on vacation in Israel, when he spots a terrorist meeting with an American oil exec. Rather than pass the info on to Mossad via his niece or Stony Man he goes of to investigate on his own, just to prove that at the grand old age of 70+ he can still fight Arab terrorists. He gets captured and Stony Man launch a rescue mission. Enter Mack and David. Or at least two very wooden impersonators. Do they care that Katz is being tortured? Not really. They are more concerned with Katz spilling the beans about Stony Man (a real possibility) and obeying orders, because if you can't obey orders then you should be terminated, which is what they discuss doing to Katz and several stages in the book. How many times has Mack been captured? Or one of the other characters? Dozens, and yet I cannot recall a single instance of a discussion where it is suggested that the captured pal be executed. It didn't happen in Able Team: Ironman and it hasn't happened since. But here it seems to be SOP. Let's shoot Katz! And why not? The guy is over the hill. He seems to think that he is invincible. He seems to think that he can take on an army of terrorists all by himself. He ignores orders (but he has done that dozens of times in various books). And why does he take this mission so personally that it becomes an obsession? There is nobody out of his past, so revenge isn't a motive. These are just regular Arab terrorists that Stony Man or Mossad could easily handle. Katz's motives are not clarified. So lets shoot him. Perhaps Mack will do it. Bolan shoots anything that gets in his way, including two security guards who get it whilst he is sniping the office of one of the villains. Why? Just because the oil exec is dirty, does that mean that everybody who works for that company need to die? Would Bolan shoot everybody in Enron just because a few top men are bad guys? Mike Newton implies that he would. But then this is wooden Bolan and not Mack Bolan who gets angry at the worlds injustices. Then there is Rebecca Mindel, the newly introduced incompetent niece of Katz. We have never heard of her or her father before but her she is at the end of Katz's life. And she does fumble and bumble her way around, allowing Katz to escape and getting herself captured. Then there is Katz's death. Out of his league and off his trolley, Katz allows himself to get shot by a henchman. He has a final rattle of words to Bolan and then he bites the dust. And does Bolan care? Does McCarter? Where are the rest of the Stony Man teams? Why can't we have a reaction from them? Basically because the story of Katz is an add on to a template and doesn't allow room for expansion. So the death of Katz is wasted. Completely and utterly. As a final note, Katz daughter (established in Jerry van Cook's Retribution) is mentioned twice, but is done in such a way that I suspect an editor tacked the two lines on. A standard template and a wasted opportunity. I really am not looking forward to reading Retribution. There will be little Retribution and the standard 'rattling of cages'.

Not a great read, and it felt very dated, even set in the late 80's. All of the villains seemed to be vain idiots. Each and everyone of them - and there were a lot of them - had identical personalities. And all were very dull and not much of a challenge for Bolan, even with all the hype of the "5 of the worlds premier assassins". The plot was indeed vague, as already pointed out. From what I could make out, Alchupa wanted to be a drug king, but seemed to be dealing in peanut quantites and everybody wanted in. This didn't quite add up. Plus Alchupa decides to have Bolan assassinated before Bolan can poke his nose in a ruin everything, except that if Bolan hadn't been targeted then there wouldn't have been any threat to these backwater peanut dealers. That is not to say that Dan Schnidt didn't have an idea of what he was doing, the ideas were there, but they needed further developing. Oh, and to top it of, everyone and his dog knew the name of Bolan / Executioner and everyone knew what he looked like and everyone knew what he had been doing for the ast few years. Alchupa even had newspaper cuttings all over the wall, covering the Executioners exploits. So it could have been a lot better had more effort or thinking been put into it. (and is it really possible to snipe with a Mac-10?? I doubt it, but Bolan seems to manage!)

This is one that I almost didn't buy. The caption on the cover said it all "...stolen nukes..." and I tend to avoid the nuke of the week stories. I am glad that I read Blackstone's review and decided to order it any. It is very good. Not as good as Savage Game but still very good. The nuclear bombs are really only a hook to get Bolan involved in the story and feature very little in the plot. The main villain, Kaushal, is extremely nasty, but doesn't quite have the effect that the Iceman did, mainly because Iceman featured in the enitre story where as Kaushal only makes appearances here and there. Bolan and friends are once more bloody and beaten and barely standing by the end of the book, and once again Bolan is subjected to hallucigenic drugs, turning him into a slave of Kali. The Thuggee are one scary bunch of bad guys. Equipped with invisability cloaks they seem almost unstoppable. What did surpise me a little was that when various people were informed about the existance of the Thuggee, not one mentioned the Indiana Jones film. Perhaps the author hasn't seen this film !?!? Still, it was cool to see references to a past Phoenix Force adventure, Night of the Thuggee. Austenford was a good addition to the team and I hope that she returns with her Q branch goodies sometime in the future. The plot didn't really make sense. Kaushal steals three Pakistani nuclear weapons, smuggles them into India, then smuggles them to America, wanting two use two to destroy California and then smuggle the third back to India for use in Kashmir? Why not just smuggle two to America? Why bother with America at all when and attack on Kashmir, India and China would have worked just as well? I felt that the whole trip to America was superfluous to the plot, the story should have stayed entirely on the Indian subcontinent. I also have to wonder about the authors reluctance in using either Phoenix Force or Able Team in their entirety. We are informed that only James and Lyons are available, and they have to bring in outside help (Red) to work with them. So where are all the other guys? Why not just use Able Team? This happens a lot in Chuck Rodgers books, that is that he will only use individual characters from the teams but never the entire group. I find this to be very unusual. But the action scenes are excellent. From the opening chapter, through to the attack on the Pakistani army base to the house boat attack and onwards. All very exciting stuff. Well done Chuck Rodgers.

This is really a short story since it is only around 55,000 words, below the usual standard of Executioner novels. The good: For once the main villain, Sprague, doesn't have an army of henchmen to serve as targets. In fact he has only two bodyguards, making this the smallest villains 'organisation' that Bolan has gone up against. There is a very small cast of characters, so it is very easy to keep track of what is going on where. This is also the first book that I have come across that mentions Gerald Montgomery's Splatterpunk. The plot is also very straight forward which served me well this time around as I read it in work whilst pretending to read tech manuals. The average. The story is more Mack Bolan, FBI agent than it is Mack Bolan, The Executioner. Bolan really seems to be a bit off and nowhere near up to his usual level. His actions are amateurish and unprofessional and it left me wondering where was the guy that had learnt so much in Vietnam. Several times he is almost taken down by a sniper (one of Spragues bodyguards) who is even more amateurish - although this bodyguard had an amazing ability to move through bushes and climb trees without Bolan seeing him. And then there is the sequence with Bolan being captured by the fishermen. The bad. In the opening chapters of the book Bolan is in Chicago on a mission to take out a drug kingpin. His mission from Brognola is to take the drug dealer out. The mission goes to hell when Bolan is spotted. Bolan fights his way out, kills the druglord and imediently concludes that the mission is over and thinks about flying back east to report.......leaving behind several low level drug dealers and a million dollars worth of cocaine!!! What is Bolan thinking??? Is he thinking?? Where is the Executioner who would blow up the warehouse to destroy the drugs and take care of all the drug dealers?? Eventually the drug dealers - being extremely suicidal - try to take on Bolan and lose, but the drugs are never mentioned again. This has already been pointed out in several other reviews. Cellphones. Bolan is constantly out of contact and is looking for a payphone to contact Brognola. This is so lame a reason to keep Bolan solo. On one occasion when he does phone in to report - like the loyal agent he is - he is told that Brognola is off on his lunch break and would be back in one and half hours!!! I can only guess that Oregon had no cellphone coverage but the author didn't want to point this out in case he upset the natives. Sprague was also amateurish. If he was on of the worlds top weapons brokers then wouldn't he use a false name when he checked into hotels? And the authorities are equally stupid. If they were trying to prevent the worlds most deadly weapon from falling into the wrong hands then wouldn't there be a lot more agents on the ground?? Trying to keep things quiet is the only excuse that the author can use for keeping Bolan solo and it doesn't really hold water. So I'll give the story 5 stars for being average and one extra for the Spatterpunk reference.

Mental note to self: Buy more John Guenthers. He really is quite good. Although this book should have been entitled Antartic Blast instead of Atic, I really did enjoy it. Bolan and the rest of the characters seemed to have itelligent dialogue for a change - with the notable exception of Cupek who seemed to be especially clunky. There are several references to Bolan's past war against the KGB, although nobody realises who Bolan is, not even an inkling, even though the Executioner is relentless and several characters worked under Greb Strakov. General Mishenka's plot seemed thin. Okay, he was foaming at the mouth, but I still couldn't quite grasp how he would restore the USSR by destroying a good portion of America in a neutron explosion. There were two hickups in an otherwise good novel, one minor and one major. The minor one was that even though the cold of Antartica was mentioned a couple of times, there was never a real sense that it was cold. Often it seemed that the characters could move around outside as easily as they would in LA. And then there was a real sore thumb plot point. Way back at the beginning of the KGB wars it was established that Bolan learnt to fly a helicopter (see Terminal Velocity). Not as good as Grimaldi or McCarter but he could still get from A to B. However Guenther states that Bolan has never flown a helicopter in his life and has the Executioner rely on the knowledge of Russian agent Anika Faithe who is rapidly loosing consciousness. A major character flaw, and I am suprised that no editors or other reviewers picked that up. But the novel remained enjoyable. A solid 8.

I must admit that I was not terribly impressed with this Stony Man. Tim Tresslar takes the old cliche of a secret government on the brink of seizing power, but fails to add anything to it. That is not to say that the story did not have potential, because it did, but everything ended up being so mundane (along with a mundane title). Though primarily an Able Team novel the action starts with Phoenix Force in Liberia. In a previous Executioner novel T Tresslar used neighbouring Sierra Leone as a backdrop for his story but didn't really paint in any background. Here it was exactly the same, Liberia has a history of violence and civil unrest but all of this is barely mentioned, and I haven't yet assertained whether this is a touch of political correctness on behalve of the author or it is some serious editing at Gold Eagle HQ. The story follows the usual plot of the teams hitting terrorists and arms dealers until they eventually learn of the location of the top bad guys. And that was the main downfall of the plot. If the Cadre Project was so supersecret that nobody had heard of it before, how come every security guard and bodyguard knew of their leaders hideouts and movements. ABle Team and Phoenix Force learnt the information far too easily. Pol plays a large role, with two characters out of his past featuring. These are new characters, so they have never been mentioned before, but it involves a woman (Ling) and a villain (White). Needless to say the tale involves romance, hatred and revenge, accumilating in a vicious fight on the top of an oil rig. What isn't mentioned is that Pol and White are referred to as 'being in the army' but all the Vietnam references have been dropped. The Cadre Project just didn't work for me. David Campbell was a complete lunatic, almost foaming at the mouth sometimes, and I couldn't picture him running such a secret organisation. If he had been pathelogically cold and menacing then yes, but as a mad dog then no. Plus for the Cadre Project to survive then there would have to have been more political support than what there was, yet it seems that Campbell was working alone, surrounded only by venomous underlings and faceless hitmen. So, sorry Tim, but this book wasn't what it could have been or should have been.

This was my first Tim Tresslar book, and to be honest, I feel slightly disappointed in it. Knowing that Tim Tresslar is an intelligent guy and knowing that he is a journalist probably didn't really help. But because of this knowledge I was expecting a story with a little more background depth to it. Bolan starts of in Sierra Leone, a country that is slowly emerging out of a barbarous civil war, yet only lip service is paid to this. The diamond mines are barely mentioned, the RUF are barely mentioned (only in reference to the fact that Talisman was a member) the civil war is barely mentioned. So I was a little disappointed in our resident journalist. The story was pretty much a standard affair (although in fairness it is pretty hard to be original after 500 odd books). The villain, Kursk, has stolen the plans and the scientist for a secret plane, and now he wants to steal the plane itself. The action starts in Freetown, moves to a generic island base, then on to Las Vegas and finally a secret research facility in the desert. The action was also standard, no better and certainly not worse than any other author curently writing for the Bolan series. I really dont not know what else to add to this review. It was not a bad book, I have certainly read much worse, but it didn't grab me the way I was expecting it to. Sorry Tim.

Boreout. First the good. The courtroom scene was quite good, with Bolan's escape and hanging around on the outside of a building - it reminded me of the 2002 film the Bourne Identity. Secondly, the locations were extremely well detailed. Either Peter Leslie scouted out Hamburg and Lubeck, or he had an excellent map and travel guide. It was so well described that it was almost like being there. Now for the bad. "So where was the one man wave of destruction whose implacable campaign of retribution against evil had earned him the title of the Executioner?" - Blowout page 252. That is a good question, because this is in no way whatsoever an Executioner novel. This is Bolan p.i. which means private idiot. Bolan fumbles and bumbles his way around, getting caught numerous times, and only escaping when double crossing hoods assist him, apart from the time where he sets a room on fire - with him in it - in the hope that somebody would call the fire brigade. Bolan is completely clueless the whole time, and spends his time scratching his head and shrugging his shoulders. If this were Peter Leslie's first Bolan novel then I would be able to accept it, but this is one of his latter novels and it seems obvious that he really didn't know where to go with it. There are so many things wrong with the characterisations in the story that I could go on and on about it. I won't, but I will say that it was wrong and it was bad. So bad in fact, that my second hand, water damaged copy is about to become known as Binout. One star for the courtroom scene and three for the excellent locations. The rest was drivel.

This was not a very spectacular book, it was really just a nuke of the week type story. A nuke of the week story with so much padding that it should have been a regular Executioner, if it were not for the fact that Bolan is nothing more than a member of Able Team and a very characterless member at that. The book and the action opens in Riga, with Phoenix Force trying to recover some nuclear artillery shells that are being sold by a corrupt Russian official to a Sicillian middleman. The action is okay, plus a Russian Spetznatz team is thrown into the fray (although these guys and gals are part of the books padding as they ultimately serve no purpose). Once that is over we are handed over to the villains, including the Sawtooth Patriots who have acquired a nuclear cannon shell and are planning to use it on an unknown target (the cover of the book gives it away). This is all explained over 100 pages, filled with the activities of fat radio presenters, FBI agents and informers who once again turn out to be nothing more than padding and contribute little to the story. I had the distinct feeling that the unnamed author had read several Stephen King books before hand so that he ould learn all about extra padding, unfortunately he (author X) is not as engaging. Bolan finally enters at page 144 as a member of Able Team. What he is doing there, or why he accepted this assignment isn't explained. After doing a little detective work, and using a lot of hypotheses from Stony Man, Able Team is joined by Phoenix Force (yes operating on US soil, hurray for that) in assaulting the Sawtooth Patriots hideout. This was a good fire fight. Of course the nuke isn't there, and the big bosses have all escaped. So the rest of the book (70 - 80 pages) is devoted to tracking down the villains using lots of leaps of logic until a final showdown is forced in New York, involving a Spectre Gunship. So all in all, pretty average with lots of padding.

I really enjoyed this story. Bolan takes on a personal mission at Aaron Kurtman's request, investigating the disappearance of seven US soldiers inside Iraq, captured before 1991. The action scenes were well written (although occasionally hazy as to what was where), and the political scenes were also well done. It was also good to see Bolan destroy the two main villains without actually killing them. The Iraqi General was left to be captured and tortured to death by his own people, the US General was publically humiliated and hung out to dry. It was also interesting to see some past missions and events referenced, including the death of Katz, as well as having a Stony Man mission take place at the same time (Terms of Control by the same author). There were a few points that kept this story from being a perfect Bolan adventure. The main one was the time frame when the adventure takes place. It seems to have been written before the Cheney/Bush invasion of Iraq, since Bolan creeps around Baghdad hiding from Iraqi Republican Guard and Iraqi civilians, yet several times the invasion of 2003 is mentioned, almost as an afterthought. I think that the story was written before the invasion, and then given a rough polish afterwards. This led to a sometimes disjointed feel. But otherwise it was very good.

It was good. It was very good. But I didn’t think that it was as good as Savage Game. It has a lot of excellent Bolan elements in it, including impossible sniping shots, the Executioner’s ability to take on large groups of enemy special forces almost single handedly and plenty of desert survival skills. This book has it all and lots of explosions to boot. Yet Chuck Rogers manages to disappoint the reader in one or two places, the main one being the Bolan – Baibakov confrontation…… or lack there of. Ignore the fact that Baibakov would return in Blood Circle in X years time and look at what happened. Throughout the story The seven foot former Spetnaz soldier pursues Bolan, only to be constantly outwitted. The anger builds and we truly believe that there will come a time when Bolan and Baibakov will duke it out. We know that this is inevitable. Until Jack Grimaldi blows Baibakov up using rockets from an Apache helicopter gunship. This is such a disappointing ending to such a mean spirited henchman, and such a let down. We know that Baibakov does make a comeback in book 127, and maybe the two men do come face to face then, but for this story it is a major let down. The other disappointment, or to be correct loose end, is the villains plot. Anne Tyler and her husband are already extremely wealthy and powerful, but for some reason they have a tunnel dug between Arizona and Mexico to smuggle what? Drugs? Weapons? (the cover of the book states ‘arms ring’ but this is not in the book itself), illegal immigrants? All of the above? The real question is why would they want to do this? It is not really explained and the thread dangles before this reader’s eyes. But the good points far outweigh the minor let downs. I throughly enjoyed the Bolan adventure – which starts as a personal mission taken on behalve of Brognola and ends with a combined Bolan – Able Team – Phoenix Force assault on the enemy’s main base – and I am now wondering how I am going to get my hands on Blood Circle to see how the story continues.

Compared to many novels in the Bolan range, this story was very good, however compared to Douglas' previous two outings I found it to be poor. I really did not enjoy it and I found it a chore to get through. Doug's usual intense writing is there, along with the sounds and smells of the action scenes, but what this story was lacking was a story. The plot involves an Eyptian general that wants to start a war with Isreal whilst diverting Israeli attention by launching attacks out of Lebanon. There are tons of action scenes involving Bolan but I felt that these were used to cover up the lack of a story. I am not sure if this is due to a deadline and the book was rushed or that somebody did a hatchet job on the manuscript. I cannot really put m finger on why this book didn't meet up to my expectations, but something somewhere was not quite right. Bolan does work almost independantly of Stony Man Farm this time around but does recruit a group of assistants to help out with all the shooting. These include Alex (an Eygptian American and a former blacksuit (again)), Tera ( a beautiful Israeli commando working for Unit 221), Ahmed (an Eyptian commando working for Unit 777) and J R Rust (who works for the CIA and returns from previous novels by Doug and Michael Kasner). These are die hard characters who are repeated kicked in the nuts (literally) but are up and running again within five minutes. They are all hit by bullets at one time or another, but much like the characters in 24 the wounds are forgotten about a few pages later. There is a little hint towards the end of the novel that the Eygptians were not working alone and that they are being sponsered by a shadowy group of Americans. I hope that this thread continues in future novels. So, sorry Doug, I didn't think so much of this one but I hope that Suicde Highway is better.

I really cannot decide whether this story was good or bad. It wasn't bad, it wasn't brilliant, so I'll have to settle for good; good but bland. The story itself was an original for a Bolan in which almost all of the action does take place during car chases across the extremely well described city of Boston. The plot itself was nothing special, a typical A-Team type story where a big business man and his henchmen terrorise a small community so that they (the business man) can take control of the neighbourhood and build a shopping mall etc. Bolan becomes involved in this low key mission because of the manner in which a cop was killed. He takes the unusual stop of assuming the identity of the deceased police officer to spook the enemy. And eventually, after several car chases, and with a little help from Stony Man, he finally kills off all of the bad guys and rides off into the sunset without anybody knowing who he really was. But the story was bland. It was lifeless and Bolan had little personality. The henchmen are all faceless, literally since they continuously where ski masks, and the villain himself, Kirk Weatherly, was as dull as dishwater. One reason why the story felt so empty was the lack of characters, in fact there are only three: Bolan, Weatherly, and a radio presenter, Lark Youngblood. Then there were two big coincidences that helped Bolan solve the mystery as to who was behind the firebombings. After listing to a radio show faturing Youngblood and Weatherly Bolan immediantly guesses that Weatherly is behind it all, with no other reason than Weatherly was offering to buy the burnt out properties. The second coincidence was that Bolan drives around Boston looking for a greenhouse that grows an unusual drug, and finds it with very little effort whatsoever. Boston Homicide must be really slacking if they couldn't have done the same. So the story was okay but not great. It would have been interesting to see more Executioners from Murray, but I guess that he liked the Destroyer series a lot more.

It has been a long time since I read a Mack Bolan where he attacks drug dealers simply because they are drug dealers and not because they are handing out stolen nukes or in bed with the terrorist of the month. If you want a story where Bolan concentrates purely on organised crime then this one is for you. It is certainly action packed. The Executioner, during the course of 348 pages manages to take out half the worlds drug dealers. Bolan learns from Leo Turrin of a possible drug alliance between the Russians and the Jamaicans, and so begins his journey from Paris to Moscow to Afghanistan, back to Moscow, to Columbia, to Jamaica, back to Columbia and then on to Mexico. Bolan initially teams up with a Russian agent that he last encountered in Executioner 218: End Game, until the Russiian is injured in the battle. Once in Jamaica Bolan works with a British agent, Rollie Benson, who I must say struck a chord with me, and I hope to see Rollie return one day. Grimaldi is also on hand with the Dragon Slayer helicopter, once more providing over the top firepower whenever Bolan needed it. Turrin is also involved when it comes to the Mexican attack. So it was an enjoyable romp. But not without its flaws. The biggest problem that I had with the novel was the timeline. Bolan travels from Paris to Russia to Afghanistan to Russia to Columbia and to Jamaica, all the while blowing up anything that moves. The whole point of the mission was to stop the Russian mafiya from joining up with the Jamaicans. The head of the Russian mob, Trechenko, is to be found, throughout the story, hanging out at the Jamaican drug lords mansion, whilst his empire is being destoryed back home. He even dispatches men from Jamiaca back to Moscow to get Bolan. Yet he remains there the whole time. How long was Bolan busy? Days? Weeks? It is very unclear. And Trechenko just hangs around and gets angry. Yet later Turrin is captured by the Mexicans whilst Bolan is busy in Columbia. Bolan learns of Turrins capture and departs for Mexico. We then see Leo's side of the story and learn that he is now in captivity for three days. So it takes Bolan at least three days to get from South America to...South America. Very confusing timelines. It was also never very clear if Bolan was taking the mission from Turrin and the DEA, or from Stony Man via Turrin, but that didn't detract from the story. I also felt that the story was beginning to drag by the time that Bolan arrives in Mexico to learn that the Columbians and the Mexicans were teaming up the same way that the Russians and the Jamaicans were. All of these company mergers and takeovers on the criminal world makes my head whirl! But it was still a good story and a welcome break from the stolen nuke covered in nerve agent type adventures.

Mack Bolan meets Resident Evil. Okay, so I haven't seen the film, and I haven't played the video games, but I have just watched the movie trailer and it seems that the premise for Lockdown is identical. A powerful corperation in a top secret underground facility have accidently released a virus that turns normal people into super-strength flesh eating zombies. Instead of Mila and Michelle we have Mack and David. I have no problem with the idea being copied and placed in a Mack Bolan book, lets face it, Resident Evil isn't exactly original, but it is original for The Executioner. There are no suprises or plot twists, the standard 'B' movie plot is used of running down dark corridors while being chased by hungry, invincible monsters. And it works. Bolan and McCarter want to rescue Brognola and any other survivors, and you just know that any cardboard personalities will not survive for very long. So on the whole I enjoyed this semi horror romp...except... This is a short story! It is only 183 pages long. The rest of the 218 pages are taken up by a preview of Devil's Bargin aka SuperBolan 100, which isn't even a 'special' or 'milestone' story. I felt cheated. Lockdown could easily have been longer, and I am not sure where the blame should be placed for this. It was my understanding that GE want 68,000 words for an Executioner novel, yet this falls way short. Maybe Robbins was instructed to write a shorter story by GE. I just don't know. And then there is chapter two. It has already been pointed out in another review that ch 2 has no place in Lockdown and is slightly disturbing. If you wish to read Lockdown then take my advice and skip the second chapter entirely. Here's why.. **SPOILER** Bolan has just finished of a mission and is feeling hungry. He is unarmed, after fed-exing his guns back to Stomy Man. He stops at a store to buy some chicken sandwiches. Whilst he is there the store is held up at knife point by two drugged out thugs. The only other people in the store is the owner and a mother with two children. And of course the Executioner. The man who took down the Mafia and has difeated hundreds of foes including Splatterpunk. So what does the great man do? He cowers behind the shelves and hopes that the thugs will go away. Yes, you read that correctly. Bolan thinks that he is too far away to be of any use so he hides. The store owner grabs his shotgun and starts shooting only to miss and die at the hands of a thug. Only then Bolan decides to act. But he acts too late and the mother and her two children are gunned down as well. Of course, Bolan kills the two thugs and another one outside the store as well, but the damage has been done. Four innocents, two of them children, are dead because of Bolan's inaction. And what is Bolan's response? I quote "Bolan thought about the mother and children. He had tried his best, but it hadn't been enough. So be it. He had no choice but to lock the memory away..." In other words he doesn't give a damn. Is this really Mack Bolan? To be honest I have the feeling that this chapter was written by somebody else and slipped in as an afterthought. Later in the book when Bolan and McCarter encounter their first mutated zombie, they do everything in their power to stop themselves from killing what was once a woman. So much so that when Bolan does evenutally kill her/it he appologises. And this is the same Bolan who feels no regrets in his failure to save a family from some two bit street punks? I don't think so. This book had a lot of potential, could have gone a lot further in the horror of the laboratory but fell short. And chapter two was an absolute disgrace. Only six stars for this one.

Assault on Rome, or Asleep in Rome? Mike Newton wrote some real gems around this period, including The Trial and Eternal Triangle. Unfortunately this entry does not reach anywhere near the same standards. Bolan is in Rome to rescue a hostage from the reborn Red Justice Column. The RJC featured in Tuscany Terror, but other than the name, the new group has no relation to the old group whatsoever. Bolan bungles the rescue and afterwards swears to have revenge and destroy the RJC. Tuscany Terror is one of the shortest Bolan stories published, and this story is just as short. The padding that makes up the gist of this novel is just unbelivable. We are treated to whole chapters on what indivdual characters are thinking, which isn't so bad until you come across exactly the same thing a few chapters later, and a few chapters after that. I was left with the distinct feeling that pages had been photocopied before being submitted because many of the 'thoughts' were identical. I was skipping whole pages at one point, something that I do not like to do. Bolan infiltrates the RJC by walking into the first bar that he comes across and bribing the barman with a 1,000 lira note. Please! That was about 25 US cents in those days. What a bribe! Bolan is promptly approached by a memeber of the RJC, promptly gets into a fight with the police to prove that he is a 'bad guy' and lo and behold he's in. Bolan meets up with the villain, Carlo Frenzi, and spends the rest of the book worrying about killing Frenzi because he might not learn the whereabouts of all the bombs (that is the plot by the way. Bad guy has planted bombs around Rome and is blackmailing the authorities) and somebody else may pickup where Frenzi left off. These fears are completely groundless as we see that the henchmen are all idiots, they are regularly executed by Frenzi on a whim, and Frenzi himself isn't all that smart anyway. This worrying really comes to a head when Bolan watches Frenzi detonate a bomb in the middle of Rome that kills hundreds of tourists, while the Executioner does nothing to stop it. Absolutely nothing. Because he doesn't yet know where the other bombs are......until a few pages later he walks calmly into the radio room, sees a map with all the locations and writes the info down. Gads! Both Mike Newton and Mack Bolan really had a day off on this one. Newton seemed bored with the whole story, forcing the words out, and his characterisation of Bolan really suffered.

I did enojoy this book, even though it took me three weeks to get through (due to a busy family!). The good points have been pointed out in the first two reviews. Bolan does have emotions, he isn't a cardboard cutout running around shooting people. The other characters, both good guys and bad guys, are also solidly written. What has been written by Dexter and Monsta Mack can apply to my review as well (apart from laughing out loud at the jokes or crying at the death of a character)! It is interesting to note that Bolan is involved in only three gunfights in the first half of the novel. More investigation work is applied, as well as setting up the rest of the characters. The American villains were enjoyable, the senator, the general and the henchman. All were bad guys that I could wait to see get it, and I was slightly disappointed that Bolan didn't kill the senator at the end. Perhaps Mike intends to have the senator return in a future novel. I felt that the inclusion of the Chinese faction was a little superfluous to the plot. If the Chinese had been removed from the story then very little would have been lost (except that the novel would have been a regular Executioner). I would have liked to know how the Chinese learnt of the Zero Platform in the first place, but I either missed this or it was left out. One thing that I feel was a missed opportunity was Grimaldi's loss of his girlfriend. The novel ends with Bolan going off to explain to Grimaldi what happened to her, but I think that some excellent character development was missed by not having this in the book. The only thing that I did not like in the novel was when all four parties (Bolan, Valens & Co, the renegade airforce group and the Chinese) show up at the Wyoming lodge at exactly the same moment. Not ten minutes too early or five minutes too late but exactly the same moment. That was far too much of a co-incidence for me. But on the whole this story was excellent and I recommend it to one and all. Now to order Mike's next SuperBolan, Cirlce of Deception.

This was a so-so story that really didn't engage me. The plot has a meglomaniac Czech politician wanting to create a new Bohemian empire by attacking the West using chemical weapons. Bolan and crew run around Europe and America foiling each attack and destroying storage silos. I had the feeling throughout the book that vanCook wasn't really sure about the characters that he was writing about. Carl Lyons dwells on his "experiences" in Vietnam and when Katz is injured Enzico administers first aid while Calvin James, the corpsman, looks on. The time line was also very disjointed. At the end of one chapter Bolan is trapped in a buring building. We then switch to Able Team who travel from the East Coast to Middle America. Then back to Bolan who manages to escape the flames. Phoenix Force also managed to get around far too quickly. On the good side, Charley Mott was included in the Able Team adventures. But, all in all it was very average.

This book was extremely difficult to get through. Sure there was lots of action, and an over the top body count, but the problem was that it was all very very boring. All of the characters were paper thin and as dull as dishwater. The action sequences were lifeless, and I am not talking about the 200+ dead bodies either. There just wasn't any spark to it. And Bolan was out of character. As already pointed out in another review, Bolan orders a team of SEALS to shoot dead a group of regular US Infantry soldiers if they interfere. I just couldn't believe that piece hadn't been edited out. Another time Bolan stops for a cup of coffee when the base is under attack. Sure! Have a break, have a Kitkat! Also as pointed out, why didn't the US authorities simply change the GPS access codes? Unbelievable! We are also expected to believe that the opening of the observatory would be guarded by almost all of the islands military forces, leaving only a token force at the GPS base. Luckily nobody told the Japanese that they could now bomb Pearl Harbour with impunity. Schneider did have a plot and motivation, but unfortunately this was lost in the mess that was the story line. There were so many other plot flaws and problems with the story that I am amazed that it was accepted for publication. Whilst not as bad as Uforce, it is still dire. Avoid at all costs. You won't miss anything.

Double Action? Not really. The book wasn't that bad, but it wasn't very good either. There were several poorer parts about it, the worse was Bolan's actions in the raid on the vineyard. Bolan is on a night probe, when he is discovered by a casual worker that, after helping himself to a bottle of wine, wakes up from sleeping and spots Bolan. Bolan immediantly kills the guy with a knife. It is not stated that the guy was a terrorist or that he had any weapon. He is a casual labourer, killed by Bolan. For a while I had visions that I was reading another series in which the main character went around killing any and every witness. Further there was mention of a fictious country (how I hate those) with several imported terrorist that play very little part in the plot and the usual cardboard personalities that come and go with very little thought. So what did happen to Mookie after the plane crash? On the plus side, the villain(s) this time were not masterminds but quite ordinary. The main guy turns out to be the head of the labour union at the troubled Ranton Oil Company. He kills a little too easily for an opportunist, and it seems that he has no regard for his brothers, both of whom die early on in the novel. So, all in all it was an average book, with average villains and an average plot. It gets and average score from me.

The overal feeling that I had with this novel was that Australian author Matthew Rielly could learn a thing or two about characterisation from reading this. The story was packed with non stop chases and stunts, much like Reilly's work, but had many excellent character moments. A non stop chase over 24 hours. Bolan survives gunfights, plane crashes, motorbike chases, more gunfights, exploding freighters, helicopter pursuit, car chases and finally a physical fist/knife fight that (almost) rivals Chuck Rodger's Savage Game. A Hard Pursuit indeed. Once again Douglas P Wojtowicz supplies plenty of continuity to previous novels. Kasner's CIA mna Rust is mentioned, but the largest tie in is the use of the shipyard from Ron Renauld's Stony Man: Vector Three. The adapted ship plays a promenent part in the last third of the story. Two new good guys are introduced, former blacksuits who are familiar with Striker, and life long best friends. The two men provide Bolan with fire support as well as a never ending supply of wise cracks. The villain, Ahmur Ibn Laud, is a nasty piece of work. It is obvious that he is insane from the beginning, but being so charasmatic he his built up an army of fundamentalists willing to die for him. This is a guy that believes Osama bin Laden doesn't go far enough in his attacks on the West. So he has a big plan and is on the eve of implementing it. I had only minor quibbles with this novel, hence the nine star rating. The major point (to me) was the constant barrage of pop references that the characters refer to. Okay, I know the characters of LOTR and Batman etc, but the Johnny and Hadji references lost me. That dragged the story down slightly. It was never clear how many fundamentalists were on board the oil tanker, or why so many men were needed. Certainly not to pilot the ship. Most systems are so automated on tankers (even criminally adapted ones) that very few men are needed. Jack Grimaldi flies halfway around the world to assist Bolan in the latter third of the book but then is underused. Since Bolan was onboard an aircraft carrier there were more than enough pilots on hand to help Bolan. Grimaldi wasn't really needed, but I suppose that he turned up just in case his superiour skills were required. Grimaldi's presence, while superfluous, was not in any way detrimental to the flow of the story. So, all-in-all, this was a very good Bolan novel. I enjoyed it and would recommend it to one and all.

This story didn't hold my interest at all. The problem that I had with it came quite early in the novel, during Brognola's briefing of the Stony Man crew. The dialogue went something like: "Somebody is blowing up nuclear power stations. You have to find out who it is and stop it. This is your target. Yes, the politican wannabe in California. No it is him, we are certain of it. Why are we certain? We don't know really, just a feeling and the fact that the President doesn't like him. No, I don't want you to look elsewhere for villains, this man is guilty. Guilty I tell you. We want you to concentrate all of the firepower on this target and nobody else. Any questions?" Luckily this target is the bad guy, but I was left wondering what would have happened if Brognola's intel was wrong. On the plus side is was fun to see Bolan + PF + AT all working together on one attack, even if AT were left at sea for the majority of fight. I also liked the Columbian hitman since he had the most depth of all of the bad guys. Gadgets was supposed to have fallen in love with one of the Green Shirt activists during the mission, and when she is wounded and crippled during a staged anti nuclear protest he swears revenge. Unfortunately it seemed so shallow and I wasn't drawn in to Gadget's request. Carl Lyons also seemed out of character during all of this. When Gadgets states that he is out for blood, the Ironman just shrugs and lets Gadgets get on with it. This just didn't seem right. So all in all an average SM story.

The president of a small African country has a slight problem. His two children have been kidnapped by rebels who want to overthrow him and break all ties with America. Not knowing what else to do president Karima turns to his old pal, who is now POTUS. POTUS sends in his top man, The Executioner. Bolan spends much of the mission hunting for the two missing children - hence the title Shadow Search. The children are first kidnapped by the rebels and then are stolen by slavers who intend to ship them, along with many other children, out of the county. Bolan follows the trail across the African bush, engaging in fire fights with the rebels and eventually the slavers on board a rusting freighter. Once his primary mission is accomplished Bolan then has to rescue Karima and the US ambassador from rebels that have launched a coup. Needless to say Bolan finishes off the bad guys and ends the coup. My biggest problem with this story was the fictional African country of Tempala, and one thing that I do not like is fictional countries, especially since there are a great nuumber of countries in Africa that would suit this story. Mike Linaker does, however, create more background to his country than many other authors do with theirs. The only other thing that I did not like with this novel was the inclusion of the Cubans. I really did feel that this was a superfluous addition to the story. Do rebel Africans really need their hands held by the Cubans when launching a coup? The support characters (apart from the irratating Cuban) were well written especially Jomo, a police officer, who assists Bolan in the first half of the story. I also appreciated Bolan's reaction to his discover of the young boy that the slavers had left to die. Bolan's wrath was a flashback to the feelings and emotions of the vintage Executioner. The main plot reason for POTUS to involve Bolan in this mission was to rescue the two children of his old friend. However, several times it is mentioned that president Karima was about to sign a deal with the USA to build a harbour for the US Navy to use as a base and to sign over copper mining rights to American firms. The proceeds from these agreements would help rejuvinate the poor African country. At a time when American Trade is viewed with suspicion Mike Linaker has cleverly written between the lines indicating that POTUS' primary interest is in the copper and harbour rights. The fact that his old friend is president and needs a favour is a secondary issue. Obviously Bolan's primary interest is the rescue of the children. Diplomatic interests do not even weigh into the equation. All in all this is a good adventure through the rugged African landscape, even though the landscape is fictional and even though there are Cubans wandering around. A solid 8 stars.

I really can only mirror what Monsta Mack and Maxdanger have said in their reviews. This book was okay but read very slow at times. McDade uses a different approach for Bolan this time in that the Executioner has to bodyguard a potential witness from the New York mafia. Unfortunately this is where the plot failed as a Bolan story. It reads more like an FBI agent stry but Bolan's name is inserted instead. The witness, a mafiosi's son has to investigate his own company to find out if the mob have been laundering money through it. All well and good, but since when has Bolan needed hard evidence to go after the mob? He knew who the enemy were, but spent the book worrying about evidence. So this didn't add up. Then there was the ending. There was an ending, wasn't there? Not really. We, the readers, are left dangling. Bolan rescues the witnesses kidnapped son (and we find out during the final gunfight that Boaln has no compuction about shooting dirty cops) and the story finishes suddenly with these sentences "They could enjoy a breif respite but the warrior knew that Carbone would pursue Dominick with dogged determination.....But until Fontanelli accessed the information that revealed the extent of Mob infiltration, Bolan would be there at his side." Sorry, Mack? What happened to your modus operandi? Go and shoot Carbone. Don't hang around at Dominck's side for the rest of your life. he other thing that bugged me was the murder of the prostitute that was mntioned throughout the book. It was never explained why she was murdered or by whom. So, all in all, just an average story that could have been better.

When I started this novel I didn't think that it would be very good, however I was surprised by it. Many of the Mel Odom stories that I have read of late have been disappointing, but this one was on par with his earlier Bolans. The Stony Man operation centers around a UN Peacekeeping mission gone wrong. A tiny African country is split apart by civil war. The UN go in to keep the peace, but when US soldiers (of course) are killed then Stony Man are sent in to disrupt the civil war by attacking the various warlords, shutting down their arms suppliers in Germany and escorting a potential leader in America. Everybody gets a piece of the pie, including Able Team. One of the stronger points of the novel that I enjoyed was the political backdrop. Very often the politics of a Bolan novel are overlooked or ignored. Not this time. POTUS, the Senate and Britain have a strong political role which adds to the overall momentum of the senario. Of course, there is the usual line of villains manipulating things behind the scenes, but they were not the stereotype meglomaniacs that we often see. One, the computer programmer, even slips away at the end of the story, after we learn that she was working for a mysterious third party. For me there was only one draw back to the story. I hate fictional countries - really detest them. There are more than enough countries in Africa for an author to choose from. Sure, create a fictional government, and a fctional senario, but please no fictional countries. It was never clear where this country was, although I presumed that it was sandwiched between South Africa and Mozambique. So for the fictional country this book looses a star.

I struggled through this story, the plot just didn't hold my attention at all. It wasn't a good plot, it wasn't a bad plot it was just bland. The villains were all identical. I was halfway through the book, still wondering who exactly was in charge of the ANI. Halfway through it turns out to be Albano. Albano and his lackeys were, unfortunately, identical clones of each other. There were no characteristics to seperate them. Plus they were all pretty dumb, and it stretched credibility that they could pull off what they did - although I can believe that it really would be so easy to get onto a Navy base as long as the right people were in the right place. Bolan and friends were equally flat and uninteresting. I did wonder about Katz, it seems that he is now running around firing a M-16. With one hand? Is that possible? But it was the plot that failed the most. Mike Newton attempted to make the last quater of the story a sort of "Hunt for Red October". This might have worked if more people had been involved in the hunt for the renegade submarine. Unfortunatly the hunt was restricted to Stony Man personnel. Jack Grimaldi is posted to an aircraft carrier, and he is the only person who can hunt down the sub. No other navy perwsonnel are involved. Equally annoying was the attempted helicopter attack on NASA. Able Team - armed with a stinger missile - take it upon themselves to guess where the stolen helicopter will show up and lie in wait for it. There is the option to call in assistance from the Navy and other armed forces, but Pol decides to use "his considerable influence" and have all the other hunting parties grounded. Just so that he can shoot down the helicopter. Equally annoying was the assassination of the Cuban agent by Able Team. Didn't they realise that they could grab the agent and interrogate him, then turn him over to the FBI/CIA and have them interrogate him? A wealth of information was lost because Able decide to ambush the agent and cut his throat instead. Bolan is pretty much a team player, but does go solo when his FBI contact (a pretty woman) is kidnapped by the enemy. He does his usual thing of blowing up things and leaving messages behind until he learns of the location of the girl. So nothing new there. There are hints of a romance between the two, but that is mysteriously dropped in the second part of the book. So, all in all, the story had potential but for me it just fell flat.

I always believe that every author writes at least one bad book, and in my opinion this is Michael Kasners bad one. Compared to other Kasners that I have read this one was awful. So where do I begin? To start with the characters were as wooden as they possible could be, the dialogue stiff as a board. Bolan's dialogue could easily have been given to any character in the book, and nobody would have been any wiser. The villains were cardboard cutouts, just waiting around to be shot. The head villains were just plain dumb. The Stony Men were equally dumb. Bolan allies himself with the Russians early on in the book, and doesn't raise an eyebrow when the Russians start planting carbombs in the middle of the streets of Bangkok to take out Big Gold Liu's property. Yeah, right. And the prose was just as stilted as the dialogue. Worse, a great many things were repeated, either in dialogue or in the story line. At times I wondered if I was reading M:I2, book of the film. Bangkok was a generic location. It could have been anywhere in the world, it would have made no difference. An author doesn't have to visit such a location to be able to give the reader a feel for the exoctic location. Other recent novels that have featured Bangkok did give a feel for the Orient. With Condition Hostile there was nothing. Why were all the Russians insistent that Bolan have sex with Marita? Bolan wisely declines; after all it seems that the entire Red Army had had sex with her at one time or another, from generals to conscripts. However, the thing that annoyed me most was that Bolan was really intergrated into Stony Man. No Arms-Length Alliance here. Several times he asks permission to go after Big Gold Liu (what a dumb name) and only does so once Brognola has granted permission. Ugh! Kasners other novels such as Warhead and Conflict Imperative have stood out, but this one really falls along the wayside. Sorry Michael.

If somebody were to ask me ‘Is this book the most exciting Executioner that you have ever read?’ I would have to say no; Iron Fist still holds top place for me. However, this novel does come a very very close second. It is that damn good. There were times in the story when I thought that it was all going to go down hill. The worst moment was at the end of chapter sixteen when Iceman reveals his main plot to steal four F22’s and fly them to South America to sell them to the Russians and the Chinese. I experienced deja-vu and wondered where I had read that before. An hour or so later I realised that it was from Dale Brown’s ‘The Tin Man’. The only difference was that the villain wanted to steal F117As. But fortunately this plot thread failed to materialize. Instead we have several rip raoring action packed battles that leave Bolan almost dead. In fact, I was wondering when somebody would say something like ‘we have the power to rebuild him.’ at the end when they find Bolan tearing into the Iceman with his last remaining strength. There was nothing left of Bolan. Nothing at all. He really believes that he has met his match and that this is his last stand. Brand’s voice boomed across the mountside behind him. ‘You’re dead, asshole! ‘Bolan nodded wearily. They were going to bring him down. There were really great moments in this novel, my favourite was when Bolan answered the mobile phone in the middle of a battle to answer the Iceman’s recruiting call whilst taking down the Iceman’s soldiers in a buring house. Brilliant writing. Best stop now before Chuck Rodgers starts walking on water I am looking forward to his next novel, Blast Radius. The only thing that I didn’t like about this book was the poor cover. Otherwise it is a solid ten star story.

It is twenty years ago to the year that I picked up and read my first James Bond novel The Man With The Golden Gun (1983). Now, two decades later I have read the final (so it seems) 007 novel The Man With The Red Tattoo. I approached this story with some apprehension. I was expecting another adventure along the lines of Never Dream of Dying, where Bond would be equipped with gadgets galore and perform death defying stunts to elude his pursuers. That formula works well in the films, but I believe that the Bond of literature should rely more on his wits than on equipment from Q Branch. So imagine my suprise when I found myself reading a novel where Bond has hardly any gadgets (a Knife hidden in his shirt collar and a Palm computer that can send out a tiny EMP and is fitted with a self destruct device) and the car chases that do occur are very normal ones of hanging out of the window and trying to shoot your opponent. Wow! Vintage Bond! Well done Mr Benson. **Spoilers** The story takes place almost entirely in Japan. Bond is involved in the hunt for Goro Yoshida, a top terrorist who wants to drive out all Western influence and turn back the clock of time in Japan. There is a lot more detective work for Bond than usual, following the bread crumbs that will eventually lead him to Yoshida. Bond is reunited with Tiger Tanaka who is now semi retired and is partnered with Japan's top agent - who also happens to be a beautiful woman. Later on through the novel he ends up with a different, but equally beautiful woman. So for the most part I enjoyed the novel. But what didn't I enjoy? Benson obviously put a lot of research into this novel, the listr of people that he wishes to thank is two pages long. But this has it's down side. For three quaters of the novel it seems that every third word is Japanese and in italics. After a while this became irrating. The last quater of the novel was almost free of the intalics, and it seemed then that it was very rushed, as if Benson could feel the deadline approaching and had to complete his work in a hurry. This made for some very unsatisfactory reading. The helicopter attack on Yoshidas hideout could have lasted longer, and the demise - or lack of - of the top bad guys also wasn't handled well. One other thing did irk me a little. So what happened to Kissy Suzuki, the heroine of You Only Live Twice? Benson did mention her a couple of times and if you are extremely lucky then you will know what happened. In 1997 Benson published a short Bond story in Playboy entitled Blast From The Past. In it Suzuki and Bond's son are killed by Irma Blunt, the henchwoman of Blofeld. Since I do not have this story I found it to be personally annoying that these facts are inserted. Of course, for Raymond Benson there was little choice, he had to say something. So, of all of Benson's 007 novels this has to be my favourite, and I find it a shame that it will probably be his last. ps. Bond uses his Walther PPK throughout the novel. Vintage Bond!

I really missed the plot in this novel. Really. I had the feeling that there was a plot, but somewhere along the line it just got lost, and left me wondering where it was all going. Bolan is in Seattle at Brognola's request to search for a group called the 'Silent Brotherhood' who are 'sniffing around a nuclear power plant.' Bolan immediantly focuses on the local Mafia because an army agent was killed and he is related to a Mafia don, in addition to another army guy, Corporal Goss being missing. Thus the Silent Brotherhood is forgotten as Bolan sides with one Mafia don in a war against another, and teams up with the Shadow, the mafia dons top hitman. Thrown into this mixture are a series of cardboard personalities that blend together so much so that I was left wondering just who was who. Bolan makes use of a security team from Boeing who have no problem with shooting mafiosa, rescues a prostitue called Gloria, who has no real place in the novel but is mentioned more times than the mafia is, and finds Coproral Goss' body in the house of the one Mafia don after first trying to join the Mafia then turning sides and being shot by them. Confused? I was. The only redeeming feature was the fact that the Mafia knew who Bolan was, (despite calling himself Mike Belasko, and refer to him as The Executioner. However, this makes little impact on the Mafia, as they seem to say "Oh, look, its The Executioner, and he is going to attack us. Now, where were we..." There was a lot more potential, but in the end this novel failed to deliver. very siappointing, as I was looking forward to a good ol' mafia story.

Bolan starts off on a solo mission, going up against a new drug pipeline. Hurray, a solo mission! Unfortunately Bolan starts too phone Brognola for help half way through the novel as things are getting "difficult". Brognola "advises" Bolan to get out of Miami as things are getting too hot!! What? I am reading an EXECUTIONER novel am I not? I always thought that it was Bolan that turned up the heat and the rest run off for safety. The DEA agent and the undercover agent story line started off okay but it did become repetative and boring after a while. The Mafia plot was, well, lame. There wasn't much of a story after the DEA agent sideline filled up the pages. Bolan, at one point, asked Brognola for information on the Toronto Mafia, but later phoned a contact in the Five Families, a contact that was an enforcer, but Bolan "actually liked him". Eh? Bolan likes a Mafia thug? What is the world coming to? The enforcer kept emphasising that he didn't know much when in fact the entire plot is spilled in two pages of dialogue. Anyway, this entry of Mel Odom's was poor. It most cetainly was not up to his usual standards.

This story was quite interesting, although a little slow at times. It is very much an infiltration story, the main action doesn't start until chapter 17, before that there are a few little fights but nothing really worth noting. The main plot is that the Cult of the Assassins has been recreated and they are for hire and wrecking havoc throughout the world. Bolan is sent in to neutralise the threat. The weak spots then begin to show through. Bolan has a Syrian born CIA contact that shall lead him to the secret fortress - except that the Syrian doesn't know where it is. Bolans mission is to plant a homing beacon so that Isreali jets can bomb the place - except that Bolan doesn't know how he will achieve this once the fortress is found. This is all very vague and to my mind it weakened the story. Luckily Bolan & Co encounter an IRA terrorist and his cohort on the way to the fortress. Bolan kills the bad guys and assumes the IRA man's identity. Then they manage to infiltrate the fortress. Why Bolan simply couldn't radio the map co-ordinates to the Isreali's is anyones guess. There then follows a stretch (literaly) of Bolan being shown around the place before his false identity is discovered. Bolan is put on the rack and stretched. Of course he gets out of it and there then follows more action with the great escape. Bolan makes several allies, and all of them - apart from the attracive Isreali agent that he meets up with - bite the bullet with little or no regret from Bolan. I personally dislike a novel where the author creates a character only to be used as a bullet catcher. So, the story was okay, but not wonderful. It had potential but really failed to deliver. Oh, and the villains are the usual cardboard fundamentalists which can also be annoying.

I looked forward to this book after Sky Killers. To say that I am disappointed with it is an understatement. It was awful. So where do I begin? Let’s start with the boredom. It was a struggle to complete it, and I did want to complete it just so that I could give it an honest review. The plot is that the villains (the fact that it is Czech terrorists for a change does merit a star, and that the villains were at least interesting) have stolen the plans to a super torpedo and are now manufacturing them and selling them to anybody with $100,000 dollars. So far so good. But is seems that these torpedoes have been sold to every Tom, Dick and Harry group in the world, and the intelligence services didn’t even have a clue. So why was this boring? Because, we, the readers, are subjected to chapter after chapter of what these torpedoes can do, as highlighted in the beginning of the book. Oh, the carnage, oh the destruction and devastation! Are we told this once? Twice? No, we are subjected to it time and time again. It seems that all these Tom, Dick and Harry groups that bought the torpedoes also have the means and technical know how to get them into position and use the things. There is the opening attack at the US Navy base in the first chapter, where we learn what these torpedoes can do, but then there are the follow up attacks in Pearl Harbour, the attack on several whales in front of a Greenpeace ship, the attack on the Golden Gate Bridge (which I am ashamed to say I skipped because I was bored with it all) the attack on the Channel Tunnel and the attack on Zandvoort in The Netherlands. But not once do we learn why these targets are being attacked, or by whom. Who on earth wants to attack a Dutch seaside town? The Belgians? This irate reader from Kaatsheuvel? We are not told, simply because it is completely irrelevant to the plot and serves only to waste space in the book. And then there are all the inacuracies. Nick Pollotta did recieve critisim in his last novel, Sky Killers, for all the technical faults, including some from this reveiwer, so I was expecting more of the same here. I was not to be disappointed. In fact I was disappointed that Nick Pollotta would make so many more mistakes. Yes there are lots of little things, especially on the nautical side (although I was suprised to see that Nick knew that a submarine is refered to as a boat and not a ship), as well as Mr Pollotta seeming to think that 4 fully grown men can sit in a two seat Apache helicopter; but there was one major error in the novel that can only be put down to laziness, as there most certainly was no research carried out. In the opening of chapter five we are treated to the scene of people driving their cars through the Channel Tunnel from Britain to France. It makes a good scene for those of you that are unaware that the Chunnel only takes specialized trains, and that is one train in one direction in one tunnel. This error was even worse than the one in the film Mission: Impossible. I was disgusted by this lack of research on behalf of the author. I could go on and on about how bad this book was, but I would like to keep this review fairly short. So, I hated it and it recieves only one star for it’s villains. Oh, and Mr Pollotta, I also got fed up with the repeated references to the Prime Minister of England. It is the Prime Minister of BRITAIN. I had best stop now before I say any more.

Douglas has made an fantastic debut with his Blood Trade adventure. The story moves along at an excellent pace, the action is well described (although the description of the guns sometimes lasted to long) and Bolan's pain and wounds are extremely evident. By the end of the novel Bolan looked pretty much like Bruce Willis at the end of Die Hard, in other words, a really mess, and I think that Bolan will be out of action for sometime (or at least until his next adventure). The sub characters were 3 dimensional and not cardboard cutouts lacking in personality. I did occasionally get mixed up with which ally was which (was he the gay mercenary or the little CIA guy?) but that is my error and not Doug's. It has been commented that there was to much Soap Box Preaching. I did come across that and sometimes it lasted too long, but it was no where near as bad as I expected it to be after reading that review. There were some errors in the novel, due to last minute changes that Doug had to make. Katz was removed from the second half of the novel, and yet there are several references to him being in Thailand. These little errors have kept this novel from receiving a perfect ten. But, well done Doug, and I a looking forward to your next novel.

This was a very interesting account of how a highly trained commando must not only fight terrorists and other foes but he must also butt heads with some extremely bureaucratic idiots in his own organisation. The behind the scenes look of the world of the SEALS is a fasinating one, told of course, from Marcinko's view point. He travels the world eating snakes and blowing things up for the US Navy. Not many people like him, and he makes no secret of that. In one way this guy is to be admired for his achievements, on the other hand I find him to be a really bastard for cheating on his wife and family so often, and openly boasting about it.

Of the four Jon Guenther novels that I have read, this one was by far the best. It was a well written story, with villains and organisations right out of today's headlines. It kept me hooked until the end. There were a few tiny loose ends, but nothing worth mentioning. The only thing that did irritate me slightly was that Jon seemed to be under the impression that all French people speak American English easily (most of them don't even bother to learn basic English) and that the French drive on the same side of the road as the British. But I do recommend this story.

This book really was mediocre. In the past the various Bond authors (Wood, Gardner, Benson) when adapting a movie script, have attempted to fit the story into the novelized world of 007. However, this time Benson has made little attempt to do so. It is clear at times that he has literaly written a 'book of the film'. This for me was glaringly obvious when at one point Bond was wishing for a form of transport, and whould even have settled for a cello case! Also noticible were the flat action scenes. Again, in the past, when an author was faced with a script that merely said 'insert car chase here' they used their imagination to create something, even if it differed from the final film. With Die Another Day Benson has not used his imagination at all, and several chapters of the book can be summed up as 'watch movie first, then insert action scene here.' All in all, this was a very poor attempt by Benson. He has done better in the past. I was bored with this book of the film.

This story failed to hold my interest. We are treated to a senario in which the bad guys have control over an agressive concentrated radar, which can jam all radar in the target area, as well as render electronics useless. The enemy use this to provoke war between Iran and America, whilst the real coup, the overthrow of the governments of Libya, Iraq and Syria happens in the background. The villains are the usual mix of cardboard Arabs and ex KGB agents. America's only interest in this is to know who attacked US warships using the radar. The first conflict, an engagement between Iran and Armenia is of little interest. Stony Man, within no time, work out that this can ONLY be done using A.C.R. So the teams are sent into action to find out who could be behind this. There follows the usual run around senario of shooting and using truth serum before Phoenix Force and Bolan finally destroy the enemy base. All in all this was a very average and unexciting story.

This was most certainly not one of Mike Linaker's best novels. The plot felt thin and overstretched, and there were so many top bad guys in it that I was at one point lost as to who was doing what. However, this book loses most stars for it's "missing chapter" In chapter 17 we find Bolan and his partner Clair on the run from bad guys at a disused movie studio. We then switch to Able Team in ch 18, before being brought back to Bolan for ch 19. Chapter 19 opens with Bolan filling the bad guys with lead because one of them had shot Clair and had bragged [past tense] about it. Did I miss something? I went back to check. No, at then end of the last chapter Bolan and Clair were on the run. So how the bad guys caught Clair, and how they managed to corner Bolan to brag about it is left out. Whether this was Mike's error or an editorial error I have no idea, but it did spoil the rest of the story for me.

This wasn't so bad a story, with all of the action for Bolan taking place in America. The villains, an Israeli terror group, want to destabilize the Middle East by using advanced computer chips for cyber-terror. The whole story takes place over a day, which is a change from the normal week long missions. The only real plot grip that I had was that I was left wondering how the Israeli group got so much equipment (including a large transport aircraft) and so many men into America without being detected. Otherwise it was a good story.

This story wasn't too bad. We have the vicious Camorra who wish to destroy the Mafia in the USA, and who do not care who gets in the way, then we have the Mafia, who are only a former shadow of themselves (I wonder why) but still believe that they are kings of crime, fighting to survive. Last but not least, we have The Executioner who is thrust into the mix. Thus there is lots of action, and several near misses for Bolan, especially when he seriously underestimeates the Mafia commando team. Unfortunately there are a few let downs. To start with, Bolan is on a mission to kill a leading Mafia figure, when he is caught up in the Mafia / Camorra war. So far so good, but then the reader learns that Bolan has been handed the first assignment from Brognola, and then receives a second assignment - find the Camorra - also from Brognola. I always thought that the Mafia was a particular favourite target for Bolan, and that he needed no orders to chase them. Guess I was wrong. We do have Bolan reflecting on the time when he did attack the Mafia in the past. Unfortunately nobody in the Mafia seems to remember this as they are all running around wondering who would dare to attack them. For this inconsistancy the book loses one star. The Camorra cause havoc where ever they go, at one stage we learn that the civilian death toll exceeds 500. Bolan is quite happy to work with the FBI (as Don Pendleton's Mike Belasko) but no mention what so ever of bringing in Able or Phoenix to assist. Towards the end of the story Bolan is in the middle of nowhere in New Jersey, five minutes later he was in downtown L.A. I was also left wondering what mother in her right mind would be out walking her dog on the streets of downtown LA at midnight, accompanied by her five year old daughter. They all die as Bolan botches his shooting and fails to stop an explosive laden truck in time. Oh well.

I am hesitant in how I should review this book. On the one hand it was quite well written, on the other hand - for reasons explained below - it was awful. The plot was nothing original, a rich Japanese wants revenge against the USA for the atomic bombs dropped at the end of WWII. It has been done before, even in the Bolan series (Ex 99: Code of Dishonour). However how the villain goes about it is extremely twisted, and it left me wondering why he waited so long to implement his plan. However, that is not the reason why this novel doesn't rate higher. First, in the openening scenes, we have Bolan and a team of commando's in Beirut to arrest the Iraqi's who have committed the worst attrocity (to date 1997) in American history. Bolan arresting somebody? Hmm, that does not sound like The Executioner. However, there was a greater character flaw to follow. The second action sequence is a big one. In order to rescue the arrested Arabs, Chicago is turned into a war zone. Buildings are destroyed, trains are destroyed, the Sears tower is all but destroyed. This all comes about because of a team of dirty FBI guys, who are in it for the money, are working for the Japanese. Bolan is sent in by Brognola to investigate the FBI guys. Bolan knows at the outset that the guys are bad, but he decides to sit on his hands and see what happens. So we are treated to the utter carnage in Chicago in which thousands must have died (we are not told how many) which Bolan could have prevented had he acted sooner and put pressure on the FBI guys. Does he feel guilty about not acting sooner? No, in fact the Chicago incident is barely mentioned again. This spoiled the book for me, hence it gets only five stars.

This story was quite enjoyable, with many tense moments written into it. I particularly liked the way that T J Hawkins past comes back to haunt him in the form of the main villain, who was quite a nasty piece of work. There were a couple of things that did annoy me however. Little errors, like getting Eygpt's currency wrong, or having Bolan shoot down a Mil-24D Hind gunship with a single shot from an unknown rifle I can almost overlook, but I did not like the way that the author used so many fictious countries. I didn't see the need for this at all. We are treated to all manner of strange names from four different "countries" so I often found myself wondering where the guys were. Why not use the jungle of Rwanda instead of the jungle of Bongo-Bongoland? This just didn't make sense. Of course, the author does win a star simply for mentioning Katz's daughter. At least there was some continuity in this novel!!

This story was awful. Carl Furst has created a fictional country, and the meglomanical leader has captured hostages of different nations. How he did this, or why remains unknown. Every country wants to send in a rescue team, and in the end Bolan leads a mixed team of different nationals. Every single character is instantly forgettable. When some of them were killed, I was wondering which one it was, and I really couldn't care. When the hostages are rescued, even more cardboard cutouts are thrown into the mix. I felt that Furst had lost track of who was who, as there were around 16 good guys in the whole story. Then there was the mission plan......ummmh, parachute in, walk, and walk, and walk, assault the baddies palace, then walk and walk and walk. In fact there wasn't a plan at all, and the mission should have failed from the start. So, poor characters, little plot, and a never ending supply of ammunition did not make this a memorable story. Not one to be recommended

This book is a cross between an autobiography and a look into the behind the scenes story of the SAS. McNab starts out with a chapter or two about what a rotten kid he was before he finally joined the army at the age of 17. His story picks up when he goes for Selection with the SAS, and how he failed in his first attempt to join. Once he is in the SAS we are treated to what life is like in the SAS. Self discipline is rampant, there are no superior officers constantly looking over the shoulder. We also go on many missions with McNab, to Northern Ireland, Latin America, Africa etc. During all these missions we also see how McNab's family life falls apart due to his commitment to the SAS. There are many gaps in the narrative, for obvious reasons. Unfortunately this distorts the sense of how much time has passed. One chapter we have McNab extremely proud to be a father, the next chapter his remembers how much fun it was to take his little girl to the sweet shop. This makes the book slightly disjointed. One thing that I did enjoy was the fact that McNab never boasts about his abilities. I was half expecting one or two big "I am" 's, but this never materialised. McNab is very modest about his skill, even though he is one of the top soldiers in Britain, and in the world. A fascinating look into the life of the SAS. I enjoyed it.

This is a difficult story to judge since there is nothing to judge the book on. Johnny Bolan for some reason becomes interested in the massacre of fifteen illegal Mexican immigrants. He investigates and decides to call in big brother for help. What follows is the usual plot of Mack Bolan running around San Diego destroying various targets. Eventually Mack and Johnny's ally, a female police officer, is kidnapped, so Mack runs around leaving messages all over town for the girl to be returned alive. This is just a standard formulaic plot the has been used time and time again.

This is one of the best Stony Man books that I have read in a long time, and it almost became the third Bolan book to receive ten stars from me. Nick Pollotta has written an exciting and fast moving story that doesn't let up at all. There is a real sense that the world stands on the brink of chaos and anarchy that is seldom captured in other stories; although I think it would have been better to have had "News Reports" instead of a couple of pages devoted to what Canada or Britain were launching into space. But, this book does loase one star. I am not into guns, so I don't really mind if a .50 sniper rifle can be fired on the run or not. I can also over look the errors with the carrier aircraft. What did jar the book to a halt for me was, as pointed out by Echoes, the computer "jargon". We, the readers, are treated to jems of wizardry such as on page 234:- "The internet just collapsed," Tokaido announced..... "ISP and LAN?" Kurtzman demanded. Wordlessly Tokaido gestured at the deactivated screen. A few lines later:- .....Kurtzman said, saving a few files before terminating the link to the web. I work in the LAN sector of the computer world, and all this left me scratching my head in befuddlement. For those that don't know what I (or Nick) are on about, don't worry. Never-the-less Pollotta has written an excellent story. There were even, to my suprise, references to past adventures. Grimaldi states at one point "...I've been in space before..." refering to Stony Man 3 and 45. Price also remembers when Jared Quillian attacked the Farm in Stony Man III. I recommend this story to one and all. I am looking forward to Nick's next forray "Deep Rampage" (aka Silent Rampage, Red Dagger) that will be released in December.

This is a difficult book to review as it took me almost a month to finish it. Needless to say the plot didn't grab me and pull me in as it did for others. I found the dialogue a bit wooden at times as well as the action. To my mind Bolan moved around North Korea far to easily since he should have stuck out like a sore thumb. I was also ticked off at the deaths of Bolan's allies (Arkwright and Stack) whose only purpose seemed to be bullet catchers. At least Bolan went to Arkwright's funeral, which was a nice touch. Otherwise, I found this to be a so-so adventure. Sorry, Jon.

This has got to be one of the worst James Bond books that I have ever read. It was blatantly obvious from the beginning that Raymond Benson was writing for the Pierce Brosnan fan club, and almost completely ignoring anything to do with Ian Fleming’s Bond. One of the best (or worst) examples of this was to be found with Bond’s choice of cars. We find Brosnan, sorry, Bond driving his old trusty Aston Martin DB5. There is nothing wrong in that until I realised that Bond had a DB III in Fleming’s Goldfinger. A simple oversight? Alas no as Bond reflects on the fact that he bought the car after Q branch removed all the gadgets. Later in the book Bond was wishing that the car were still equipped with rockets and machine guns! To make matters worse, Bond is equipped with a camera that can do just about anything, including firing laser beams. Benson’s faults do not lie solely with the gadgets. He not only re-uses elements from the books (such as his criminal organisation (The Union) being a photocopy of SPECTRE) he also uses stunts that have been used in the films. In chapter 18 Bond is involved in a speedboat chase, and to elude his pursuers he performs spectacular stunts such as jumping over obstacles and performing barrel rolls in mid air and submerging his boat under water to avoid others. Correct me if I am wrong, but haven’t I seen that in ‘The World is not Enough’? To further tie in to the movies, Bond is hoping that he will shortly be given a new Aston Martin DB7 Vantage. Guess what car Bond will be issued in the next film? Then there is the villain’s plot…..there is a plot isn’t there? Surely in the 300 odd pages there must be an evil plan? Oh yes, The Union have hired themselves out to a Japanese terrorist who wants to blow up the Cannes Film Festival. That’s it. There is nothing more. Instead of a plot we are treated to Benson’s Playboy fantasies of how many fingers Bond can stick in his girlfriend’s private parts (page 192 in the British paperback). Whoopie do! For the final book in ‘The Union Trilogy’ I was expecting a little more. Needless to say that I did not like this story. I can only give it three stars, one for the torture scene, one for the ‘twist’ at the end and one for the cool title. I am not really looking forward to Benson’s next offering of “The Man With The Red Tattoo”. Frankly, this novel left me longing for the good old days of John Gardner’s Bond. Ian Fleming must be doing barrel rolls in his grave.

This book most certainly did have it all, and at times seemed over crowded. To start with, Johnny Bolan does return, in what almost seems to be a non-related story, and it is only by the epilogue that we learn that Johnny's adventure was related to a sub character that has half a paragraph dedicated to him in the final battle. I felt that something was missing here, perhaps a piece that ended up on the cutting room floor. What stretched credibility rather thin was, not the sci-fi aspect, but the oil rig being declared a country. I cannot see the UN ever saying that an oil rig was a legit country when all that country did was manufacture drugs. Hmmm! To my mind it would have been better to have the oil rig being a hidden base for drugs manufacturing. The giant squid attack was probably the best part of the whole book, and once again Montgomery writes an exciting story. The battle between the USS Seawolf and the 'king' squid had all the overtones of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, and the battle inside the oil rig was no less exciting. There were many loose ends with regard to the returning characters. The journalist (Garrison) was only a shadow of his former self, and came across as a whining wimp, when in Iron Fist he has chasing UFO's with a whiskey bottle in one hand, and spouting incomprehensible sentences that I couldn't make head or tail of. Dr West is also just a shadow of his former self. What happened to the scientist who injected a wounded soldier with Splatterpunk's nano-probes? Why was he even invited to join the mission when it was obvious at the outset that he was a liability? Able Team were in the book, sort of. Gadgets had a little to say, Ironman had a sentence, and Pol..? The oil rig battle also ended abruptly, what happened to Cassandra and Dandridge? Dandridge was shot by Bolan, but it was unclear if he survived or not. Probably not after being shot with a .50 Desert Eagle that Bolan was using. Another small confusing point is why was Turrin contacted to start with? It was to trap Bolan, but for what purpose? However, these small details can be overlooked in a story that really does put EXECUTE back into EXECUTIONER. Mack, at one stage in the story, wishes that he had a marksman medal to drop on to a corpse!

What does a UFO, a Russian gangster in New York, a Syrian nuclear base, and a Yakuza / Triad turf war in Hawaii have in common? On the face of it, nothing, but the moment we join Stony Man Farm in chapter one, they are already looking for connections, leaving the reader wondering why? Why do they think that there is a connection? This is never explained. The book started off well, with hints of an 'X-Files' type mystery (and even ends on it with a shadowy figure meeting Brognola and informing him that 'they' have been here a very long time. Unfortunately the rest of the book was the usual run around shooting anything and everything that moves kind of story that lead the reader exactly nowhere. There was a lot of needless padding that left me wondering if this was meant to be a Executioner book. What could have been a promising story leading on from COMCON just lead nowhere. I will be very suprised if the left over threads of the plot will ever be picked up on again.

This is perhaps one of Gardner's fastest paced Bond stories. There is quite literaly a price on Bond's head, placed there by his old enemy SPECTRE. Bond is to be captured alive, placed into SPECTRE's hands where he will be decapitated. The action starts in Belgium and Bond is chased all around Europe meeting up with some quiet colourful villains, including an Austrian police inspector known as 'The Hook'. 007 also meets his girlfriends for the novel, although it is unclear throughout the novel why the one, Sukie Tempesta, is allowed to stay, since she only seems to get in the way. The other, Nanette Norrich, is, unknown to us, an agent of SPECTRE, and it is because of this that the book falls apart. Why has SPECTRE invited so many criminal organizations to capture Bond when Norrich goes out of her way to protect Bond remains some what ambiguious through out. I can only surmise that it is because she wanted the reward for herself, but that is never properly explained. The book is also quite bloody, full of severed limbs and gruesome deaths. Bond uses his Bentley Mulsanne for the second and final time in this novel, afterwards it is never seen or used again. Otherwise this remains one of my favourite Gardener Bond stories, and is a far sight better than it's predecssor Role Of Honour.

When I started to read this book, I thought, Great, another author is going to try to tie some of the pieces of the COMCON story together. It certainly seemed that way. The 'spaceship' of Uforce is almost identical to the one that shot Joe Newport down in Ultimate Price, and the leader of Uforce hate the secret government of America, including our old enemies FEMA. That sadly is where the similarities end. Once the book gets going we learn that Uforce has gone rogue and that the entire government is out to stop them. The reason that Uforce has gone rogue? Simply that they believe that the US Government is now under control of 'the bad guys' and it is time to set things right. Enter Bolan and Brognola. These are not the same two characters from other books. To start with there is not a single mention of Stony Man Farm. Not once. Brognola now heads up an organization called COG, or Continuity of Government, which is made up of organizations such as FEMA. AND BOLAN WORKS FOR THEM! The book slid down hill from there. There were attempts to make UForce out to be the bad guys by having them hang out with drugs dealers etc. but this did not seem very plausible. By half way through the book I was rooting for Uforce. And half way through the book is where the story just stopped. We, the readers, are treated to 16 pages of what farmer Freeman saw in his field one night. Sixteen pages of repetative description what could have been placed in three pages. That finished the book entirely for me. I did finish reading it, but it was slow going. Needless to say I will not read this book ever again.

This book started off quite well with accurate description of various locations, but once Phoenix Force entered the scene the book fell into the usual mix of cardboard terrorists lining up to be shot. The three top villains are trying to get Spain to pull out of the EEC. okay, but PF deduce this with a single trip to the library and a tiny article on how, if Spain competes with other countries then Spanish industry might suffer. Hence, according to PF logic, anyone who does not agree with the EEC must be bad. Gee, guys, better shoot most of the European population in that case! In other words, this was just another lame PF story with little or no plot.

After the disappointment of reading bad Bolan books over the past few months this one came as a bit of a refleif. Not that it was perfect, but it was much better story than books like Uforce. Bolan is a team player in this, assigned by Brognola to infiltrate a large group of pyschopaths that are using the web to work together and plan the ultimate massacre. This part of the plot gave me the greatest problem, not that I know anything about psychotherapy but I just could not visulize a group of Hannibal Lecters coming together so easily. The rest of the story follows the usual Bolan infiltration thread. Bolan is eventually caught out and 'executed' by the bad guys who then go on the rampage in a small American town with the intent on murdering every single resident. There are many interesting side plots with well fleshed out sub characters, although at the end of the story the author (Mr Noname) leaves you wondering what happened to some of them. Needless to say Bolan and his allies (townsfolk) win through and kill most of the bad guys, although it is hinted that several got away. Overall not too bad a story, for me, though, it finished far too quickly.

This one should have been called Reader's Nightmare. The beginning started off okay, Ghaddafi wants revenge for the American bombings, so he hires an assassin to take out various targets, including a presidential candidate. After that it falls flat. It seemed to me that the novel was originally written as an 'FBI Agent' type story, only to have the agent substituted by Bolan at the last minute. We find Bolan training incompetent Secret Service agents. The level of ineptness of the agents is staggering and runs through the entire book in the same way. That stripped the story of any credibility it might of had. Only Mack knows that an assassin is out there! Only Mack can stop the bad man! Everybody else in America is an idiot! Grunt, grunt! Brognola pulls Bolan off his training exercise (why was Bolan training anybody is not explained) to show the Executioner a video of the assassinations of a Hollywood star and family. Only Bolan sees that it is the work of a professional. Brognola tells Bolan that there is nothing that they can do (then why show him the video?). Bolan gets pissed so Brognola relents, allows Bolan to investigate, and assigns Bolan a partner! Again this vein runs through the whole book as Bolan is on the assignment, then pulled off, then put back on again. Whatever happened to the Executioner finding his own path? Brognola pulls Bolans puppet strings on this one all the time. This is yet another disappointing Bolan book for me, and one that I shall not read again. Even the cover is bad, making Bolan look like a disgruntled gnome.

I was quite suprised by this entry of William Fieldhouse. It wasn't the usual pointless bloodfest that I have been reading in the Phoenix Force books of late. The story wasn't very deep in plot and featured the usual stereo type communist Chinese and facist Nazi's. What did irratate me a little was how the four members of Phoenix spent the book whining about how muched the missed Katz. Poor things. Otherwise not to bad a read.

I found this one to be a better story than the last PF that I read, which was Hostaged Vatican. Unfortunately the story premise is very weak. PF are sent to Japan by Brognola because it is suspected that Trent might by a bad guy and about to spill the beans on Stony Man Farm. Along the way PF encounter TRIO. Once it is established that Trent is a good guy, PF decide to wipe out TRIO once and for all. For some very strange reason, all three leaders of TRIO are hanging around in the same place doing next to nothing. Phoenix have no problem breaking in and finishing off TRIO once and for all. A disappointing end for the TRIO story line. Not too bad but should have been better.

This story was thin, plotless and pointless. Bolan runs around trying to break a drug smuggling ring that hardly seems worth his effort. The story is so thin that the author felt the need to add a Soviet assassin who pursues Bolan for half the novel until the bumbling fool is fed to jaguars in a zoo. The extra characters are lifeless, the bad guys serve only as target practice, and the shallow good guys as cannon fodder. In addition to all this, everybody and his dog seems to know Mack Bolan on sight, and to add insult to injury, Bolan recruits Rafael Enzico's cousin into the fight, the cousin knows all about Bolan because Enzico told him. Bolan is also using new guns, but we are not told why, or what happened to the automag. Terrible story, terrible characterization. I left me very disappointed.

In terms of action, this story was an improvement over the first book, however, I felt that the characterization once again fell short. The chief security guy for Betancourt in the last novel, Miller, is now Betancourt's right hand man and goes under the name of Sanders. The name has changed, as has his personality. Betancourt still wants to destroy they three main religious sites of the world, this time using nukes and mercenaries. Hawkins somehow manages to infiltrate one of the groups and promptly disappears. No one seems to concerned that he might be dead, so the rest of Phoenix are dispathced to Turkey to rescue Bolan & friend from a cave-in. Bolan & friend are rescued after spending three days in a pitch black cave with no food and very little water, yet niether he nor his Turkish "girl-friend" suffer any ill effects. Able Team are once again overseas, this time in Africa, along with the others to rescue Hawkins and recover the nukes. Betancourt is also there. After an excellent fire-fight at the airfield the ending is rushed and Betancourt is killed in a mine. I found this to be very disappointing. I personally would have liked to have seen more Oval Office storyline, with Brognola getting into hot water with the President. Overall, not too bad, but it could have been much better.

I am in two minds on this story. On the one hand, the villain's motives were, to my mind, understandable (although his desire to destory the three historic sites are not). I though that the Millar character of the security force was great, along with Mitchell and Givens. On the other hand, the characterizations of the good guys was way off, particularly Lyons. Since when has he been content enough to sit around and wait for somwething to happen? Also, why did Able Team need Bolan as support, when the mission was going so slowly? However, it was good to see Able overseas again. Quite a slow moving story, but not to bad, in my opinion.

Fleming intended this to be Bond's last adventure; that is until the books suddenly bacame popular. Bond is recovering from injuries sustained in From Russia With Love. M decides to send 007 on an easy assignment to Jamaica as punishment. The case is quite simple. The head of station has disappeared, along with his secretary. No one suspects foul play. Through a lot of detective work - and several attempts on his life - Bond figures out that the mysterious Dr No is up to no good and decides to visit the secret island of Crab Key. After being chased across the island and being captured, Bond learns from Dr No that No is using radio technology to send American test missiles off course, and that he his being paid by the Russians to do this. Dr No decides to put Bond to death by sending him around a dangerous maze. Bond survives - just - only to end up in the clutches of a giant squid. Bond does escape and later kills No by dumping tons of bird guano (shit) on top of Doctor No. This is one of my favourite classic Bond novels. We see a more human side to his character. When the giant centipede is crawling across him, Bond is terrified, and after killing the creature he is violently sick. Later, on Crab Key, when Bond is talking to Honey, he draws his knees up to his chest and puts his arms around them. He is badly injured going around Dr No's maze, fighting intense heat, tarantulas and a giant squid. We have the classic bad guy's speach of "Before I kill you Mr Bond, let me tell you about my evil plan." In addition there is also a secret base hidden inside a mountain. This is a great - if some what dated - Bond adventure, and I do recommend it to one and all.

I am not quite sure how to review this book. On the one hand it was great to see Able Team back in the south American jungles, and the teams relying less on Stony Man technology as a back up; on the other hand I felt that there was something missing. Unlike previous Michael Kasner novels - such as Star Venture and Hostile Instinct - this one seemed to have very shallow characterisation. Bolan, after hanging around in Peru for a week without doing anything, is takien captive very easily. Then he promptly escapes using a spoon and spends the rest of the book pestering the bad guys without really doing any damage. Carl Lyons also seemed a bit odd, especially when he was happy to let Phoenix have all the zction whilst Able guard the safehouse. The bad guys were also shallow. Just what was Collins up too? Why did he want a part of Peru? Just for a peace prize? That didn't quite add up. The story itself, on the other hand, was quite good. Stony Man goes on what is basically a personal mission to rescue Bolan, although they figured out far too early that Mack was alive. Another good point was that Able were using original covernames, although Bolan was still calling himself Mike Belasko. All in all, it wasn't too bad, but could have been better.

This story wasn't too bad, in fact I quite enjoyed the African side of the groups adventures were quite enjoyable. I do have several gripes, however. The first is since when have FOUR fully grown men been able to fit into a 1 / 2 seater harrier jumpjet? Also the actual story hook was also pretty thin. Why did Stony Man become involved? Who requested their help? Like Terry I was also a bit annoyed about the "finish on a dime" ending. What happened to Capt. Jack and Capt. Berben? Did they just disappear and allow the Somalian authorities to allow Phoenix to get away scot free? Otherwise it was a good story.

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.

This wasn't too bad a story, but I felt that it was a bit too long, the middle part of the book dragged. So Katz has a gorgeous daughter that we have never heard of before. Unfortunately we will never hear from her again, either. It was obvious that Katz was once married since there have been a great many references to his lost son in previous books, but what happened to his wife remained a mystery until now. Katz certainly seemed old in this story and very unsure of himself. Apparently he was always convinced of the murder of his wife and would tell anybody who would listen - Jerry van Cook's description of Katz makes him sound like a whining old man at some points. The only thing that I really did not like about this book was the whole Russian airport business. Bolan, Katz and Grimaldi take Russian security guards hostage and then manage to fly out of St Petersburg all the was to Israel, by presumably flying through Russia, Ukraine, Turkey and half a dozen other countries with out once being challenged. This fact really spoilt the story for me. In addition to that fiasco it seems that the President will get the three men into any country with a single phone call, despite our guys being on a private vendetta. No presidential plausable deniability on that one, especially with the St Petersburg farce. Otherwise it was an okay story.

This was a throughly enjoyable tightly written adventure. The villains were not over the top megolomanics and the locations, especially in the former Yugoslavia were excellently described. I especially loved the description of Americans on page 55. However, I did have one major problem with this story and by the end of it I was left with more questions than answers. The major proble is identical to the last Chuck Rogers book that I read, Chill Effect. It is one of distance. Once again Bolan flits all over the place with out any regards for how long it takes to get from A to B. The most ludicrous example of this is having Bolan go all the way from Lithuania to Germany and on to Silicon Valley just to ask a former Russian scientist a few questions on the scientist's front lawn. We learn that Manning, McCarter and Swartz are in the area, so why was Bolan needed? Bolan then leaves for the Congo, giving him a round journey of what, 12,000 miles? Just for a few questions that any FBI agent could have asked? Like Chill Effect, the bad guys just wait around for Bolan to stop globe trotting so they can take a few pot shots at him. As for unanswered questions, firstly, Bolan is under orders and he is on too seperate occasions worried about being ordered off the mission. Since when has Bolan followed orders? I thought he had an understanding and an alliance where he could pick and choose missions. Secondly, since when have the Serbians managed to control the former KGB so effectively that they can order KGB agents and resources around in Moscow? Thirdly, how did the oh so poor GRU get so many mini subs all the way into the Congo Basin? But apart from these descrepancies, I still enjoyed this story. Oh, and by the way, Carl Lyons brought the wire fencing to the apartment, not Mack Bolan. Of course, how they knew that it would be needed remains a mystery to this very day...

Where do I begin with this one? to start with, I specially ordered this book based on all the positive reviews that have been posted for it. What a mistake. I think that this is one of the biggest pieces of tripe that I have ever read, and at the moment I want to hurl the book into the waste paper bin. There was no storyline for this one, it was just none stop senseless violence from beginning to end that left me bored stiff with it. Apparently, over two hundred terrorists managed to capture the Vatican by entering Rome without the Italian police or Vatican security noticing until it was too late. Enter Phoenix Force. Who exactly asked the Americans to intervene? The Pope certainly did not (and that is Pope with a capital P and not a lower case p as used by William Fieldhouse throughout). So Hal Brognola just sends the guys in any way. No, wait, let's first fly three thousand miles to San Francisco to pick up Trent, when a phone call would have sufficed, and then fly six thousand miles back to Italy. Nothing like wasting time when hostages lives are on the line. And then we have the odd mixture of terrorists and their unclear motives. We have the mad typecast Iranian ragheads, the dishonourable ninjas, and Basque terrorists. According to Fieldhouse, all Basque terrorists dress in peasant trousers, sheepskin vests, red berets and all carry a shepards crooks. Really?? And yet the French and Spanish police have never caught on to this. There are a lot more negative things to say about this book, but to keep it short, I hated it. On the positive side, and this earns the two stars, Gary did have a conscience when he killed some of the terrorists, and Calvin and Rafael did feel fear at the hands of their captors, but otherwise that's it. My book is now going to be recycled into toilet paper, which is what it deserves.

I enjoyed the first half of this book far more than the second half. Early on, the bad guys, who have a cybernetics team that are almost as good as Stony Man, manage to penetrate Stony Man computers and cut Bolan and Phoenix Force off in North Korea. With out any intelligence, Bolan, Enzico and Hawkins are surrounded by what seems like half the Korean army. By this stage I was throughly hooked and was looking forward to giving the book a nine star rating. But then things started to get to easy for the Teams. The only thing that annoyed me in the beginning was the co-incidence factor. An incident occurs in North Korea. Where are Phoenix and Bolan? Bolan is in the Philippines, half of Phoenix is in Japan and the other half are in South Korea, on what are completely unrelated missions. The second big co-incidence comes when the bad guys US base is discovered in New York. Where are Able? In New Jersey, again on a completely unrelated mission. In the second part, two things managed to irate me. First, body armour. Bolan takes round after round after round and doesn't even blink. And I always thought that Clark Kent was Superman. Secondly, even though Stony Man intelligence is breached, the guys just manage to find out who Mr Big is, where he lives, that he owns a secret stealth submarine, and where his current location is without any effort at all. That I found to be a big let down. And somewhere admist all of the gunfire, Mack and Phoenix find time to study a hotel's floor plans. Overall this was a well written and fast moving story, only let down by the points I have mentioned. Oh, and The Farm is about to be attacked again, this time by a scud missile! Good book, but could have been better.

"Mack Bolan knew that he was dying." This is the opening line in the book and probably the best. Otherwise I found the story to be deeply flawed. It was certainly entertaining since Bolan was critically wounded and had to rely a lot more on brother Johnny than normal and the added threat of a small time Mafia operation in Vancouver was interesting, but that was it. Then come the flaws. Why was Mack wounded? We get a single sentence to say that he was shot in the shoulder by a DGI (Cuban) Intelligence officer. Twice. Twice in the same shoulder. Getting careless, Mack? What was the mission against the Cubans? There is no further information. I feel it would have been better for the Mob to have shot him and pursued him across the border. Why did Mack go for so long without getting any medical help? Just because his brother called him? I couldn't quite buy that which seems the greatest problem in the book. Once Bolan and Johnny do meet up, why doesn't one of them phone Leo Turrin or Hal Brognola for some sort of assistance? Certainly these are the Lone Wolf Wars, but this was far too lone wolf. Too many questions and not enough answers for my taste. This book is one of Tom Arnett's better books, but it is not as good as it should have been.

This story had a very weak premise for using Phoenix Force: a sentor's son has gotten lost in South America, and it is up to you to find him. Phoenix Force arrives to find that the boy is dead, and by looking at bullet casings they deduce that Nazi's are involved. There then follows the usual story of giving scoplamine to captives to get clues, follwed by lots of wild deductions. I was almost siding with the CIA guy on this one. All in all this was just a rehashed story that went no where fast.

I didn't find this story to be too bad, despite some of the other reviews here. The action scenes were once again extremely well written and the battle at the Farm was stunning. Despite the damage being described as "superficial" I had a sense that only a few nails were holding the place together. However, the things that I did not like outweigh the parts that I did enjoy, and not all of the problems can be laid at the feet of Gerald Montgomery. The feeling of the menace of an invisable second government was missing, mainly due to the series being "cancelled" so soon. It should have lasted several books longer so that the invisable council would have been more sinister. What really spoiled the whole book for me was the Zeppelin sequence. This was way out of place with its unexplainable sci-fi weaponry. The airship appears to shoot down the helicopters carrying Newport and Bolan, only to disappear and never be seen again. I feel that it would have been much better to have Bolan/Grimaldi kill Newport themselves, only to have their own helicopter crash afterwards. Also the destruction of Area 51 / Dreamland felt wrong. For one thing, it will probably be contradicted in the next Stony Man novel: Tactical Response. Maybe the secret hq of FEMA should have been placed elsewhere in the same desert. On the plus side, and nobody has yet commented on this, Buck Greene and the Annex finally make a crossover from Michael Kasner's novels to this one. So things are improving in the Bolan world. I didn't enjoy this story as much as Iron Fist, but it was still an improvement on a lot of other stories that have been published in the past. I am sorry that there will be no more novels from Mr Montgomery.

I didn't think that this one was too bad. It wasn't anything spectacular but it didn't "suck". I do agree with Alice's view about Bolan every dialect of Sudanese Arabic that there is, or that the author believes that everybody in Sudan speaks American English. One stupid piece in the story was that Bolan "borrows" a general's uniform to escape an enemy compound. The soldiers on the gate don't bother to ask themselves what a tall white man is doing in the uniform of either an Arabic or Black African's uniform. That was dumb! Otherwise it was a run of the mill Bolan story that was meant to be a "white"cover due to it's shorter length.

I liked most of this book, apart from what Douglas stated before. Spatkin wanting to destroy Stony Man Farm, okay, but must not hurt that pretty lady. Very unprofessional, and a very disappointing demise of this bad guy. Other wise I though the rest of the book was great. That a reporter has finally twigged to the Farm was long over due, although I was curious about the locals not saying something like "A lot of helicopters fly in and out" or "Not so long ago there was a lot of flashes and bangs coming from that direction". The Congo story I enjoyed the most. Being hunted by the cannibals across the jungle, the rivers, and finally being hold up in an abandoned building, was great and wasn't over done. And to have President Kabila assassinated in the DR Congo on the same day that I finished reading the book added an extra dimension to the overall story. On another note, Michael Kasner has placed Phoenix Force close to several nuclear explosions now. Don't the guys glow in the dark after being exposed to so much radiation? Good book, Michael.

This book was fantastic. McNab has a unique writing style that makes you want to know what happens next. This is his second story about ex-SAS man Nick Stone, a guy with lethal killing and tactical knowledge, but not too many smarts. If there is a fault with this book, then it is that Stone makes too many mistakes, and has too much bad luck. Everything that can go wrong on his operation in America, does. What makes up for this is all the little backstories that McNab throws out, and it seems obvious that what Nick Stone is supposed to have experienced in his fiction life, McNab really has experienced, from treking across the mountains in Afganistan to his experiences in Fort Bragg. Cuopled with all this is a dark and cynical sense of humour, especially at the Americans expense. Great book, and I recommend it to you all.

This is one of the best Executioner's that I have read in a long, long time. I could repeat many of the comments that have been made by the other readers, but I won't, I would just say that this is a must read. Usually I take my time reading a Bolan, but not this time, I just couldn't stop, constantly wanting to know what happens next. The story was almost seamless (apart from the bunny gunmen) and also cleared up a few points from Trigger Point (where did Bolan get all that extra support!). Able Team are back in action, and once again the story seemed like a flashback to the old days where the Team went up against Unomundo and his thugs. On the down side, (but not too far down) I found Garrison to be extremely annoying. Half the time I couldn't figure out what the guy was raving about, and I need to know what Gonzo journalism is. I only know of Gonzo the Muppet. As for Splatterpunk (where on earth did that name come from?) I found him a little too far fetched. Otherwise, wow! I now have to wait until February when I will recieve Ultimate Price. What a long wait.

It is always fun to see Bolan go up against the Mafia again. On the whole, I found this story to be a bit bland. It did have it's good parts, including the scenes with Carvaggio and the media. What I would have liked to have seen is a bit more panic from the Mafia when they realise that they are up against The Executioner. A strange thing that I found was Brognola appologising to Bolan, saying something to the effect that perhaps the Mafia boss Sienna was to big for Bolan to take down. Strange, since Bolan handled La Commissione on his own. An otherwise average story.

I just could not get into this one. Although I read it all the way through, it took two weeks of picking it up and putting it down. It was just a regular Bolan story, with nothing new. Some parts (the battle on the island) were almost a direct copy of another Rich Rainey Executioner story, Maximum Impact. The battle in the Everglades went on forever, yet the ending was very short. I won't be reading this one again.

This is one of the best Stony Man books that I have read. I loved every minute of it, and Bolan isn't even mentioned. Everything that can go wrong for the teams does. They get lost and seperated from each other (no microchips in the shoulders here)and have to rely on their own skill. Able Team are sent overseas. I could go on and on. There are only three things that I would like answered, and they are a) Did McCarter's girlfriend and resistance leader survive her injury. b) Did the evil girlfriend of Colonel Li survive? c) Where has Jack been hiding the Dragon Slayer all this time? This story is most certainly one to read!!

I thought that this book was great, much better than Kilo Class. I thought that there were only a few let downs, the biggest being that the book just seemed to finish, as if the author ran out of time or just got bored with the whole thing. The villain just killed himself, and that was it. Also the plot didn't always make sense. Okay, so Adnam wants revenge against Saddam, and enlists Iran to help him steal a British submarine to destroy American aircraft in the mid-Atlantic so that America would blame Iraq and attack Iraq for this. Far too elaborate for my taste. When Saddam was eventually bombed he wouldn't have known who was having revenge for what. Still the story was exciting. A nitpicking point is that the author has not been to Wales in a long long time, or never. People don't have to pay to cross the Severn bridge to get into Wales, only to get back into England again, and also the road signs are first in English and then in Welsh, and not just in Welsh. But that is just picking holes. This is still a good book.

The way I review a book is quite simple, the book automatically gets five stars, and then during reading I mentally add or deduct stars depending on what I feel about the story at that moment. I did feel that the book was in some places disjointed, but being forewarned that the book was originally longer did help. The fact that we learn that Newport knows that it is Bolan out there, just seems to appear with a short explaination, and also, where did Bolan find all those Rangers without giving the game away to ComCon? On the good side, Gerald Montgomery does bring a lot of past to Bolan, with mentions of previous missions and the return of familiar weapons. At last, an author who will not gloss over the fact that Bolan and crew do indeed have a past. Like Douglas, I felt that Carl Lyons should have been there in place of McCarter. The old G H Frost Able Team novels where the Team used to clash constantly with the CIA and a mysterious backing orgainzation would have fitted in perfectly. On the down side, I never like it when an author plugs his own politics in a book. I visited Gerald Montgomery's site before I read the book, so the personal politics angle stuck out like a sore thumb, at least to me. Several stars lost for that. However, on the whole this is an excellent first entry and I would like Gerald Montgomery to write a good old fashioned hit against the Mafia story. I look forward to reading the rest of the Comcon series.

This 007 story is excellent. Bond is, once again going to pieces (see You Only Live Twice) and takes it upon himself, and goes against M's orders, to track down the criminal organization of the Union. Bond follows and trail of breadcrumbs left for him by the Union and walks right into their trap. By the end of the adventure Bond is once again in hospital, recovering from his injuries. I won't say anything else about the plot, but it does pick up where High Time To Kill left off. I would recommend that you would have to read High Time To Kill first, before reading this one, otherwise the plot won't always make sense. The only three faults that I have with this story are this: 1)The Union is far too much like SPECTRE, I feel that the Union should be a lot, lot more ruthless than what they are. 2) The ending is very quick. Bond and his friends finish off the stories bad guys is six seconds. It would have been nice to have had a bit more of a shoot out or a chase, rather than just finishing. 3) When Bond is captured and about to be executed, one of the top villain's gives the customary speech of "Now Mr Bond, before I kill you let me tell you about my master plan......". It would have been better for Bond, even is his condition, to have figured the plot out on his own. Otherwise, an excellent story, and I look forward to Raymond Benson's next book, which will be around July 2001.

The best Mike Linaker book that I have ever read. No over the top bad guys, no fantastically unbelivable plot, but real terrorists in a real situation. Loved it. And no Bolan, not even mentioned! Great! The only point that I would pick up is the selective virus story, it has ben done before in Stony Man 23, but there was not mention of it, not even Able Team saying, something like "It's not the first time we've encountered something like this." Also the book didn't just finish, there was an end briefing. Keep it up, Mike!

This one was excellent, and was written in a very similar vein to Don Pendleton's original books. The villians were so nasty that you want to go in and shoot them your self. Both Bolan and Grimaldi are knocking at death's door this time around, they most certainly would have needed hospital treatment afterwards. I would almost give this book a nine if it were not for a few small prtoblems. They are:- 1. Why did it take Bolan two weeks to identify a few small drug pushers in the middle of New York? 2. Why did the chief bad guy, Torquemandan die so suddenly? I wanted Bolan or Grimaldi to shoot him. 3. Was the death march needed? It was certainly harrowing, but the drugs lords were rich enough to buy trucks that could have delivered the heroin a lot faster whilst the prisoners could have been harvesting more, instead of being mules. That didn't make so much sense to me, but I am , thankfully, no drug lord. This is one excellent non Pendleton Bolan story and is most certainly to be recommended.

A good story with an enemy other than the Mafia. Susan Landry's first appearance, and it is a shame that she doesn't appear more often.

Not too bad. Bolan wipes out the bosses of the Five Families and the Black Aces along with their leader as well as crushing the Cosa di tuttu cosa, all in one book. This one did tie up a lot of loose ends from other books, and it didn't feel as rushed as some of the previous entries.

Not too bad a story, and the plot is clearer than book 27. Some good scenes of Bolan playing the Black Ace Omega. The one thing that didn't make sense to me was, if David Eritrea was Augie's right hand man, why did Eritrea not seem to know where his boss was, or why he had been missing for two weeks?

This was the first Bolan book that I bought (I was initially attracted to the British cover where an 18 wheerler is being torn apart by heavy machine gun fire!) and the second Bolan that I read. It was very nearly the last one that I read as well. Then, way back in 1985, I was confused by a)the fact that I had no idea who Brognola etc was, having only read book 1. b) the CB talk lost me completely. c) The plot was extremely unclear. Today, points b and c still stand. I was still lost by the CB prattle, and even though I knew that books 28 and 29 were going to continue the Mafia power struggle, I was still confused over the plot. This is not my favourite Pendleton book. Two of the four stars that I have given are for the British cover.

This story is a very easy read, it is a very laid back Bolan adventure, where nobody works up a sweat, not even the bad guys. The story is a very standard Bolan hit the Mafia, so no suprises there. I did get the feeling, as I have had reading other original Bolan's, that the end was rather rushed, and everthing is wrapped up too quickly in the last chapter. This book is defiantly for thoses lazy days of sitting in the summer sun.

I found this one to be a bit disappointing. There was a lot of talk made of big things happening out in the desert, and very little made of it. If the Mafia operation was so big, then why was the ground force so weak?? This was one of amny things that didn't quite add up. Otherwise, the action was as great as ever.

I like this one, lots of action and adventure. A lot of old (and new faces in this one) and some very different sides to the main players, such as seeing that Carl Lyons isn't indestructable, and Brognola shooting at Bolan. It is a shame that there wasn't a better shoot out between the Talifero brothers and Bolan; I thought that that confrontation in the casino was over too quickly. This story could have been longer.

A fast moving story, and it is one of the most memorable books of the Mafia Wars. Lots of action and a lot more emotion from Bolan. Great read.

This was the first Mack Bolan book that I read, way back in 1985, and now 15 years later I have finally reread it. I felt that the prologue dragged somewhat, but after the first chapter the action really starts and the ground work for what has become the classic Mack Bolan was laid. I much prefer this Mack Bolan to the one we are now reading, the character was much more rough around the edges. I did notice however, that there was no mention of the bodies of Frenchi, Plasky or Seymour being found, and that leaves room for one of them to perhaps return in the furture. An excellent story.

Like almost everybody else, I finished this one in two days, and I found myself wanting to know what happens next, which is extremely unusual for a Mack Bolan novel. It reminded me a little of the film Moonraker, but with a lot stonger plot. The low body count was a welcome relief, especially when Able Team let one of the middle men in the smuggling operation go when he promised never to return to California. There were a few points where I felt that Mr Kasner could have done something different. The main problem that I found was that Bolan wasn't needed for the Phoenix mission, and perhap could have better been used chasing the leads in California along with Pol. Also, it seemed far to easy for Phoenix to get to the Venture Star and steal it back. The final problem was that both Jack and David have been in space before, in Stony Man III, but it seems that Mr Kasner was unaware of that fact. Otherwise, an excellent adventure in space. The cover also let the book down, but that most certainly is not Mr Kasner's fault. A recommended book.

I cannot make up my mind as to whether or not I liked this story. It took me a little while to get into it, so perhaps that didn't help. The overall story was well written with some good action scenes and this time Bolan remembered things from the past. The part I liked best was Bolan making mistakes and getting captured. This time out he is not infalible. What I didn't like so much was the bad guys motives. Why did Edel Schleyer hate America so much? Why did he need such an aircraft? Why spend so much money on something when it would have been easier to buy a nuclear bomb to blow Hawaii out of the water? Not as much fun, granted, but where would he have launched such a plane and how would he have gotten the troops in place. The logistics of such an operation didn't make sense. Other than that, this book is a good read, so I guess I did like it.

This story was not badly written, however it did lack a plot. Bolan was called in via Brognola via his contacts that were in trouble from a local drugs cartel that wanted to take over the government in a feeble half baked plot. Problem is, Bolan isn't really needed at all, the locals seemed to be doing quite well without him. His contact on the island, Shepard, goes from being a shady shifty character in a clothing shop, to a commando with his own intelligence organization, complete with dirty tricks department, to back him up. The only thing that I did like about the story was that the bad guys realised that it was the Executioner behind all their set backs quite early on in the book. Unfortunately nothing more is made of this, eg media intrest, Mafia hitmen or Columbian cartels picking up their ears and moving into the action. This is one story that can be missed.

Not a bad story, even though it uses the old tried and tired formula of Bolan turning the bad guys against each other and blowing up half of Panama to get a girl free. It was better written than a lot of Mr Newton's later books, in fact it is more of a return to his old style of writing!

I was not too impressed with this entry. The Phoenix fight in the Golden Triangle was the best part of the book, but after that the story deteriorated. The open part of the book with the main villains in Japan had no part in the rest of the story. Both Bolan and Able Team had very little too do. After the Golden Triangle, Phoenix moved around the world far too fast, from Asia to Britain to the Caibbean within 24 hours. A lot was made of the size of Grishins's organisation, but we saw very little of it, and very little was destroyed. With the death of Grishin it would be all to easy for somebody else to quick take over the more or less intact organisation. Not my avourite Mel Odom, he has done much better before and after this book.

Not quite as good as the first story in the duology. Phoenix learnt the name of the villian far to easily and them being under seige didn't hold my attention in the same way as part one. Able's mission was completely unrelated, and once again I felt that they should have been out in Beirut with Phoenix. It would not have been their first time in the Middle East. Also the use of the Assassins has been done before in Bolan 114:Cold Judgement, and yet Bolan had no recollection of this. No points for Mr Kasner on continuity. I would have liked to have known what happened to Rust by the end of the book. He just was never mentioned again. Despite a rather negative view of this one, it is still leaps and bounds ahead of many other Bolan novels and is still not to be missed.

I found that this story is one of the better ones that I have read in quite a while. Whilst not my favourite Kasner it does come a close second. The highlight was Phoenix's mission inside Pakistan. I did not enjoy Able's mission so much and felt that they should have been on the ground in Pakistan, taking out the secondary target rather than having Phoenix trek across the entire country. Otherwise a great read.

Expecting an immediant follow up to Breach of Trust, I was a little disappointed to find that the story took place month's or even years later. Bolan had very little to do or say in this one, and he was almost entirely missing from the big tank sequence. The last we hear of Bolan, is where he is about to take a postion to cover the others. That was it. Perhaps Mr Kasner doesn't like Bolan being in the Stony Man novels but has to place him in anyway. If so then fine, but please find Bolan something better to do, away from Able Team and Phoenix Force. I do enjoy seeing Able Team overseas again. The story at Stony Man Farm with Gorden was great. I found myself not a little unsypathetic to his postion, especially when Price and co decided on his termination after watching him play poker. The big question for me was how can Buck Greene say that somebody is a former KGB agent just by watching him cheat at poker. That stretched the credibility a little to thin. To be suspicious, yes. To deduce immediantly that he his a sleeper agent for the former USSR, no. Otherwise an allround good story. I look forward to seeing Gorden again.

A very good story, I read it in a day. I would have liked to see time zones on the cahpters (ie Tuesday 14:00 hrs - Prague), I think that would have added something to the tension. I did find McCarter's comment on page 81 a bit strange "...there are more than enough problems in the world that directly affect the States...". Really??? What happened to good old Blighty, mate?? Is America the only country in the world??? Otherwise this was an excellent story.

An good story, however I found it very similar to SM18:Stinger in it's plot. Most of the action focuses on Manning and Hawkins so Bolan has very little to do or say. It was nice to see Able Team overseas again. Overall I would have to say that this was an average outing. I did find it strange that Katz and Able Team introduced themselves to Hammer (the downed pilot) with their real names.

Disappointing that Able Team was once again left out. Otherwise okay story. Awful cover art.

This was a well written story, but it was far too much like the 007 movie "The Spy Who Loved Me." Not very original.

Another Newton story without a story line. Once again there is no Able Team. A great cover, but, who is the sixth guy in the boat??

My favorite of the Stony Man stories. Great action.

I enjoyed this one, but then I enjoy almost all of Mel Odom's stories. The chemical weapon idea didn't really grab me, but the racing to the different locations did. I don't believe that the times given at the beginning of each chapter really made sense. otherwise a good story.

A good story by my favorite Bolan author. I did find the sequence of McCarter and Grimaldi going into space to far fetched for the Bolan novels.

Overall, not a bad story. The main plot of cross and double cross of the Carlisle family often got lost in the writing and so many changes of location didn't help at all, but it still was a good story. The major complaint that I would have is that all the characters had a bit of depth to them, apart from Bolan, who was extremely wooden and seemed incapable of though for himself. On a scal of 1/10 I would give this a 7.

I'm afraid that I did not like this one. There was no explaination as to why Grimaldi/Turrin/Johnny were involved. This was a typical Mike Newton story where the characters just go from scene to scene without a back ground plot. It was a shame that the mafia didn't realize that Bolan was after them.

This was very much in the tradition of the earlier Phoenix Force novels where they got to beat terrorists with their machine guns rather than shoot them. The founder of Jin 2000 was never discovered so maybe he will one day recreate the group. My biggest problem with the story was Bolan's trip in Eygpt. Having just visited the country and witnessing the road blocks in every town and city, I found that Bolan travelled around far to easily. To get in and out of a town the traveller has to go through security checks, and whilst most Eygptian soldiers didn't seem to know one end of an AK47 from the other I still can't believe that Bolan would just slip through by hitching lifts. Otherwise this was a good story.

I normally don't buy the trilogies because either the story is too padded or there is no plot with Bolan (and gang) just running around shooting anything that moves. This one was different in the way that it did lay some interesting ground work, however I did find it all to similar to other stories in the past (as recently as Rebels and Hostiles)where Bolan infiltrates the group, gets a job as a trainer, has a field trip with the bad guys; Bolan foils the plot and is the only man left standing, and how the 'girlfriend'is captured and Bolan almost - or does - blow his cover to rescue her. I found this one to be a decent story but it was all to predictable.

This was for me another typical Bolan story in which our hero goes from scene to scene without much background story. I find that the triologies of late lack the vital story line.

An excellent Bolan story, although a bit too bloody. I take it that Hal did make a full recovery from is bullet wound, because it was no longer mentioned by the end of the book. The sniper twins as villans are two too remember.

This is a good story and is to be recommended. The battle at the clinic is very tense and well written. The only scene that I found silly was when Bolan chased some of the Nazi thugs on a tractor. Otherwise it is a good entry.

Being British and remembering the Falklands Conflict (it was not a war since war was never declared) I look forward to reading this story, and I ended up being very disappointed. This could have been and should have been a Stony Man novel which would have given Chck Rogers a lot more room to move in the story. Instead we had a story with too many changes of scene where Bolan & Co moved from one country to the next without any regard to the sheer distances involved. To travel from Argentina and back again would have taken a lot of time and that is not taken into consideration anywhere in the book. Bolan is one minute on board an SSN668 and the next he is on board a stealh bomber, again with no regard for time. The villain just seemed to wait around for Bolan just to show up. Gary Manning just shows up in Argentina to replace Gadgets again with no regard to distance. And if three members of Phoenix were available, why not the other two? Disappointing. However, the book did have it's good moments. The sinking of the British fleet was very disturbing for me, since I have been onboard HMS Battleaxe several times. This book had a lot of room for improvement, and it is one that I shall probably never read again.

I liked this one. The story moved flowed along quite fast. It is the usual story of Bolan takes on the drugs barons with no big suprises, but still a good read. Good scene of Bolan being told that he was taking in his sleep about Stony Man, April Rose etc. The only complaint that I would have is that Bolan recovered to fast from his dog bites. One chapter he is on death's door from blood loss, the next chapter it is as if nothing happened.

This one was fun since part of the story takes place in Utrecht, The Netherlands, which is not to far from where I live. The only disappointment was the fishing boat towards the end of the story. That was a bit too James Bondish for my liking.

With print big enough to read from across a room, this book was a disappointment. What was a good idea was too hastily written and could have been a lot better. That one of the villans, Dr Chen, was forgotten about by the end of the book didn't help. Did he die in the explosions, did he escape or was he captured by the Coast Guard, Mr Odom? One of Mel Odom's not so good entries to the series.

The action explodes from the print that is so large that you could read it from the other side of a basball stadium. A standard A Team style story of finding a hick town being threated by the bad guys. The shootouts were good, though. The ending attack on the White House was not needed at all and spoiled the story. It would have been far better to have Bolan finish the bad guys on the airfield instead of him sitting in a car for four days.

It is always fun to see an old villain return. The story was better written than Chet Cunningham's original (council of kings).

Despite other reviews for this book, I found it confusing and disjointed. I lost track of what plot there was early on, and lost track of who belonged to which family even earlier. This is not a book that I would recommend to anyone.

I always like the Bolan stories that take place in Asia, but this one was a bit slow.

I quite enjoyed this one. One of Newtons better stories.

I enjoyed this story until about 3/4 of the way through, and then the story became rather rushed and it finished with a lot of loose ends. How did everyone, including Bolan, suddenly decide that they had to move on to Cambodia. It was briefly mentioned earlier in the story but never xplained why everyone had to go back. Why wasn't the gold recovered before the story began. And who's codename was Hacker? Far to many loose ends. Otherwise a good read.

This was a good entry from Mike Newton. The only thing that spoiled the story was the appearance of a Soviet agent. He was not needed in any way for the story line. Since when have the KKK needed the KGB to be racist???

This would have been a good story if it wasn't a Bolan novel. As a Bolan story it didn't work so well, with Bolan having nightmares over 'Nam and waking up screaming. It also gave the impression that Bolan hadn't done anything for a long while and this was his first mission in eons, plus it gave the idea that this was his first return to South East Asia since the Vietnam War, discounting the earlier novels such as Return to Vietnam, Cambodia Clash and Devil's Horn. Otherwise it was a good story.

The first half of the book was good, but the second half was a let down. The two worst points in the book was where Brognola moaned about not being involved with the Stony Man Farm anymore, and yet he was fully active in the Phoenix Force/Able Team novels. The other point is where the book cover advertises a world threatening plot, and yet it is all revealed and blown away within the last few pages. It would have been better for the plot to be revealed to the readers (or at least part of it) earlier on so that we knew that Bolan was on a tighter deadline than what he thought. A average entry for the Executioners Lone Wolf wars.