Jonathan

One of only two Mark Ellis Bolan novels, and I can understand the James Bond references. If you were to replace the name Bolan with Bond and picture Pierce Brosnan then Hellfire Trigger could be a new 007 adventure. The villain who thinks he is a god, the weird henchman lots of uniformed minions and a lady Russian scientist. A mix of Doctor No, You Only Live Twice, Moonraker and Goldeneye all mixed together. It was an easy read, but for some reason it took longer than expected to get throu. But all in all I agree with those that praised the story but I also agree with those that did not enjoy it so much. Otherwise I do not have so much to say about it. It was a middle of the road story for me.

For what it is worth, I enjoyed this story and am glad I ignored some of the negative reviews posted here. The story has aged well, there is reference to old tech such as VCR's but otherwise it is a tech free adventure. I do agree that it was a bit thin where Brognola is called in to help an old friend out and so calls in Bolan to do the lifting. Why did Brognola stay all week in Italy? Does he not have a family? A serious job? That Bolan gets involved is okay, Bolan can choose his own mission's no matter how small. Here we have a case of kidnap gangs running riot in Italy, and I found the author's place descriptions, accurate, especially Milan. No, it is not a spectacular novel, but it is enjoyable and better than a lot of novels that have been published in the various Bolan series.

Now this is more like it. Unlike the previous Stony Man that I tried and failed to start, the first 30 pages of this story just ripped by. The author gives us an intense mission for the teams and I am glad that Able Team got so much story. Yes, mind control has been used in the past, including by Chuck Rogers himself, but I didn't mind. I think the story takes place over a week and there is a lot of globe trotting. Rogers also introduces his unsual outlandish colorful characters, this time in the form of Winters and Rauch. We do not get to meet the villains until the end of the adventure, and I must admit, that part came off feeling a bit rushed. But otherwise this book was thoroughly enjoyable and I recommend. (one pet peeve, and it happens only once, but once again we have characters morphing into each other. Calvin James becomes Carl Lyons who becomes Calvin James within three sentences. Does nobody ever check this stuff?)

I am not going to rate this book. I didn't finish it. I got as far as page 30 and gave up. To start with, I was bored with it. We are given the villain's motives in the prologue, it is the usual Muslims are not Muslim enough and Westerners are to blame etc. Then we move into the mission briefing for Phoenix Force and Able Team, and I cannot recall them ever being given such a flimsy briefing before. It was nothing more than "there are people that don't like Americans" and "Oh look, there is an American Muslim who has visited Canada four times. Very suspicious." But the worst was the fact that the author kept getting names mixed up. First Calvin James is going with Katz, then a few pages later it is Manning. Then, the moment I gave up, when the rest of Phoenix are getting mission ready, Blancanales is suddenly among them, despite being with Able Team moments before. If an experienced author cannot keep the names straight, and the editors could not spot the errors in the first 30 pages, then the book is not worth ready. I'll move on to something else.

A 6.5 from me. It was a generic adventure and a little bland. A journalist (who happens to be a CIA spy) is killed and this upsets the USA so much that Bolan is sent in to investigate using bullets. Baddies want to detonate a Red Mercury nuclear bomb (a substance that does not exist) in Mumbai for...reasons and Bolan has to stop it. He is joined by Jack Grimaldi and for some reason Leo Turrin who is now a commando (why this character and not a member of Phoenix or Able?). And of course they work their way up the ladder killing every villain they meet. The locations were Dubai, Mumbai, and the villains lair in Costa Rica. The name Dubai could be substituted with Chicago and no one would be any wiser. There was no local description, not even a mention of the tallest building in the world which Tom Cruise was climbing when this book was written. All so generic and I was happy that I eventually finished it - it took nearly a week.

The final novel in the SuperBolan series. I was ultimately disappointed in it. There was no bang, just a fizzle of a cancelled series. A regular novel that had Bolan jumping around different locations in Alaska, engaging in page filling shootouts that didn't move the story forward and laying siege to the bad guy's mansion, an event that has happened oh so many times before. But what did disappoint me was that this is a sequel to SuperBolan 140: Infiltration. The story is heavy on the theme of revenge and you really need to have read Infiltration to understand who some of the characters are and why they are so upset with Bolan. I have the novel but I have yet to read it - but the disappointment is from the fact that no where on the cover is there a mention of a returning villain / organisation. Meanwhile the villain's plot involves somehow crashing a military plane because...reasons and capturing a US coastguard cutter because it has some sort of technology on it (we are not told what) and the bad guys want it but it is never mentioned by the good guys. So it was a bit incoherent. But kudos for the title and I am surprised it wasn't used before.

Interesting note: Victor Bout is a real life Russian arms dealer who is currently in Russia being protected by Putin after a prisoner swap. In Interception Bolan, of course, kills him off. I had to remind myself that this novel was published almost 20 years ago and Croatia of today bares no resemblance to it. But even when reading I thought that the author must be referencing research material that was already 10 years out of date. It didn't feel quite right. I will agree with another reviewer about the first 50 pages, especially the North Korean train sequence - it was very Mission: Impossible and very enjoyable. We start the adventure in Split, Croatia, go off to North Korea and then back to Croatia with a stop off at Stony Man along the way. To be honest, it could have been any generic city as what was described would have fit anywhere and I was disappointed in that. No mention of the Roman part of the city or any other historical references, just bland buildings. The plot is minimal. The Russian arms dealer has joined up with a geneticist to do something but we are not told what. Bolan, Grimaldi and Charlie Mott attempt to get to geneticist but eventually fail to keep him alive. The story is one gunfight after another. By the end Charlie Mott is barely alive and Bolan and Grimaldi are fairing little better. There is no description of what our three heroes look like so they do come off as pretty cardboard. The book is enjoyably written, but thin on plot and characterizations and there was little sense of how long the story took as Bolan globe hopped a bit in the first hundred pages.

The story is good, but I didn't feel as drawn into it as other reviewers were. Bolan falls into the adventure by chance as he becomes suspicious of a load of guys driving around Washington DC who then turn out to be terrorists intent on assaulting an office block. This leads Bolan, and eventually everyone in Stony Man to be on the hunt for Roger Kabel, arms dealer, who has somehow chanced upon the ideal terrorist weapon. The scenes where the weapon was used were very good. However, I found that the jaunts to Brazil and Malaysia a little dull after so much action in the USA. It is a good story, but it didn’t engage me as much as I thought it would.

Not sure whether to give this one a 7 or 8. I shall go with an 8. Overall it was pretty good, a fast moving story involving everybody including Bolan. No nuke's of the week here, the terrorists have stolen Patriot missiles and the launch systems and everybody is taking the threat very seriously. If I had a complaint then it was that Stony Man kept locating the bad guys to easily and the bad guys went from being master planners in the opening of the book to bumbling idiots by the end. I did get lost occasionally on who was who but that is down to me. So, yeah, a pretty cool adventure.

The final paperback to be produced, and from here on the series would limp along as ebooks until cancellation a few years later. It is surprisingly a good story and I enjoyed it. Bolan is up against three enhanced Russian assassins and gets beaten up a lot, he is even in a hospital bed at one point. There are two main action sequences, a tense car chase across Paris and a big gunfight in the centre of Madrid. There is a lot of background plotting which adds depth to the overall story which I enjoyed. The characters were well written, except for Bolan who was a bit cardboard, and I would have liked to have had a bit more information on his French partner, Palomer. I would liked to have known why she went to Madrid and how the jurisdiction would have worked. Too short a book, I guess. The villain, Utkin does get away, and due to the series cancellation we will never find out what happens next. As a further point, the book is gun porn free. I think Bolan has a Glock as he is passed ammunition for it at one point, but for the most part he has either a pistol or a gun. All in all, a very good story and I recommend it.

This story was okay, but as another reviewer pointed out, it didn't make a lot of sense. The whole thing about wanting revenge on the journalists, and then pursuing them around the country didn't add up. To start with, Brognola and the DoJ, or the FBI should have whisked these guys away to a safe house, regardless of how much they protested. Also in the illogical department was why was only Bolan assigned to the case? Members of Able Team could equally have been utilised in protecting the journalists. But Bolan flies around the country from one location to the next, shooting the terrorists whenever he found them. The highlights of the book were Bolan's interrogation and the sequence where one of the terrorist sleeper agents tried to sell the stolen car to his friends, only to have his throat cut. I must admit, I did not see that coming. But the rest was a pretty average adventure.

I found myself enjoying this one. A classic story of Mafia, no terrorist team ups, no nuclear weapons, just Bolan after the LA Mob. There are Marksman's Medals left behind, the Mafia remember Bolan, the cops remember Bolan, and there are recent adventures against the Mafia recalled, including The Bone Yard and Resurrection Day. To be honest, there are no surprises in the tale. Bolan hits various Mafia sights in the pursuit of the Iceman who is a mob member and has been creating snuff movies. The strikes go as planned and Bolan wipes the bad guys out. Johnny makes what was his second appearance in the Gold Eagle range and has a relatively low key involvement until the end. If there is to be a complaint then it would all the characters musing to themselves. This I did tend to skip read. But all in all this was a good tale with a great book cover.

I am kind of lost on this book. It was so bland that I have already forgotten what I should write, even tho I finished it yesterday. The villain has developed a EMP weapon by coercing a kidnapped scientist to build them. At one point he is setting up an auction to sell them, then the story becomes him wanting to use them in Libya to bring down the government, as well as using them against an arms manufacturer and some mercs in the USA because...reasons. Assisting him is a turncoat CIA agent who has turned against everyone because she has falling in love with the villain. Able Team and Phoenix Force enter and get engaged in random gunfights that happen for no reason and are merely there as page filler. They carry a mix of weapons so there is no chance of sharing ammo in a firefight, and they even carry M16's to board a yacht, when a much, much shorter gun would have been needed. So what did I like? Umm, the cover? That looks cool. But the rest of the story was sadly so generic.

I don't have the book with me to refer to at the moment, and I have forgotten some of the characters names. But this to be a clue as to what I think as I only finished the book 2 days ago, and have forgotten the characters already. As mentioned in the previous review, there is the female lead Bolan knows from a previous mission, one that took place in Sarajevo and was so sustantive that he remembers everything about it and the woman made such an impression that even Hal Brognola remembers her, and I would love to know which book this is as I cannot place it. I suspect it was never written, and was all background filler. Whatever, it was very distracting. What happened to the Secretary of the Interior in the good ol'USA? Why did he assign Smith to interfere with the mission and to kill Bolan? Who was Smith? What happened to the turncoat Secret Service agent? Everything was dropped or forgotten about. What was the villain's plan? Why does the cover of the book insist that the villain wants military aid when this is not mentioned in the story? The villain seemed to have enough weapons and men. Nothing made sense. This was an incoherent story that took me days to get throu as I was just not interested.

This is the first time I have read this author - I have heard that he isn't very good, but I was pleasently surprised. Yes, the adventure is very low key. Bolan is tasked with finding a senator's daughter who has fallen in with a grungy cult of misfits. That is the plot. The daughter wants to leave, the misfits won't let her. They are living in an abandoned fairground near a town that is controlled by a newspaper owner who is using the local police as his enforcers, but this part of the story wasn't explored fully, probably due to length restrictions. The cult do not pose any problem for Bolan (even when he is poisoned and hallicinating that he is back in the Congo on a mission). He manages to shoot a few of the hapless cultists, but the marines who are sent in at the end manage to get the two main cultists. I think that this must be the lowest body count in all of the books that I have ever read in this series. Sadly, the arms dealer plot is dropped. With regard to the other reviewers review, Able Team do not feature in this book and are not even mentioned. I have no clue where that would have come from.

Not too bad, but the story failed to grab me for some reason. Maybe because it was constant shooting and what there was of a story seemed sandwiched in. Phoenix Force are in the mountains of Kashmir, which is a great location for the story and driving around in two specialized APC's that never seem to run out of ammunition. The bad guys are a Pakistani general and an Indian general who have waves of cannon fodder soldiers for Phoenix to effortlessly shoot. Meanwhile in the USA Able Team discover rogue teams of Chinese cannon fodder soldiers who are lining up to be shot. Hidden in between all the carnage is a story of China trying to seize belerium from Kashmir by causing a nuclear war between Pakistan and India as a distraction. But that is sadly lost in the gunfire.

One of Mike Linaker's earlier novels and it was better than the previous one of his that I read. To start with, I got throu this in a couple of days, although there was needless exposition that I skipped, like how the guys all carry different weapons and calibres in to battle, because they never need to share bullets. but hey, ho! The story wasn't much, there are some bad guys in the Amazon who are Nazi's, supplying drugs and creating a super virus. Go in and destroy. Three of our guys are captured, one escapes. Meanwhile the other two team mates team up with Jack and his new Dragon Slayer helicopter which I take is a Blackhawk. Then everything blows up and gets destroyed and the good guys get to go home. So better story than the later novel.

I like the cover, I like the title and that is it. I thought, seeing as how the author, Mike Linaker, died recently that I would give one of his books a go. Maybe I should have picked an early work, because this one was awful. Not only was the prose stilted and the 9 year old girl said unnatural things, but the entire plot was lifted from one of Mike Newton's cookie cutter novels. There is a kidnapping and Bolan decides to set two organised crime outfits against each other to see what happens. Somebody gives Bolan a list of targets to attack and off he goes, blowing up warehouses and attacking porn houses. Just like in Newton's novels. It took me a week to get throu this little novel because I just didn't want to continue. This has put me off Bolan novels for a while, at least until the summer. Dreadful story. Please skip.

I loved this adventure and if I had a complaint then it would be that it should have been a SuperBolan instead of a regular Executioner. The plot is similar to the Bruce Willis film The Tears of the Sun. Bolan is parachuted in to rescue a bunch of cadets from being eaten by cannibals, or captured by an Iranian team. The group are pursued across the DRC by the bad guys as well as avoiding crocs and snakes along the way. The introduction of the Dragonslayer helicopter by Grimaldi was a bit Deus ex Machina but I guess something had to happen to keep the word count down. I can't really add any more to what others have said about the story, other than I loved it.

To start with, I love the cover. It is one of the best of the artist Herring. I love it. Not sure what the title means thou. This was an average mission and there wasn't a lot to get excited about. Bolan isn't sure why he is in Africa, Brognola doesn't really know either. The promise of an Ivory Coast cartel vanished and it turns out to be two overly rich bad guys who are after even more money. There are a bunch of goons and Bolan easily shoots them as they run throu a doorway. There are not that many gunfights and Bolan spends most of the time investigating. So, just a 7 from me. What I do want to know is what happens to the street cat that adopts Bolan??

And again I find myself going against the general opinion. Sure, this is a zombie story, and several movies are referenced, but I still found the first part of the story fun. The second part, the trip to Congo was less interesting, but being trapped in the village during a mission that gets out of control was good reading. The villain I found to be a bit shallow, and could have been developed better, but overall a fun adventure.

The first two thirds of this book I loved. Phoenix parachute into Kyrgyzstan wearing local clothing and carrying local weapons, just as it should be. Able are sent to the Dominican Republic and get caught up in civil anarchy. Phoenix become trapped in a village, under fire from local terrorists, the military and the bad guy's mercenaries. Everything is exploding and enjoyable. The last third goes wrong and there are multiple errors that neither the author nor the editing team bothered to correct. Page 233 is the worst with Gadgets, on a solo mission, morphing into Lyons, staying Lyons for the next paragraph, then morphing back to Gadgets again. On the same page! Later Able Team, still in the Caribbean, drive past barricades guarded by Russian soldiers! Over in the war zone, McCarter makes his escape in a Land Rover, which becomes a Toyota which becomes some Russian vehicle. The bad guys also have the same identity issue with their transportation. Then after all of that, two PF members suddenly arrive in Amsterdam in the time it took Able Team to have a gunfight. So this part was poorly written and edited, but the first parts of the book were great.

Why is this book called "Final Run" ? I really missed that explanation. For me this was just an average, nothing special adventure. A villain returns from Tower of Terror. There is an unlikely alliance between a cult run by this villain and some KGB goons. For some reason Able Team get involved in the case of documents being stolen. There are endless pages of waffle followed by a mediocre gunfight at the end. But the most import part of the story, Carl Lyons reuniting with his son, is just an after thought. A missed chance for some character building. So I was disappointed by the story.

I forgot to review this book when I finished reading it. In fact, I forgot about it as soon as I had finished it. There was nothing memorable about it and I have even forgotten the characters names a week later. The location was mainly Paris, but could easily have been any generic city. The People's Liberation Front of Armenia (or something) has kidnapped a group of rich,obnoxious Americans because....reasons. Then there is a sub plot of the Front for People's Liberation of Armenia also wanting to kidnap the kidnapped because...reasons...although the leader of the FPLA (I am making these names up) wants to keep the $20 million for himself. Nobody seems unduly worried that obnoxious Americans have been kidnapped, only one French police officer seems to have been assigned the case. Enter Mack Bolan. For some reason Bolan just shows up and takes command. No reason is given as to why he is there, no mention of Brognola or Stony Man Farm any where in the novel. Bolan just appears. And then proceeds to blunder his way around, going from one meaningless gunfight to another. And then the novel just finishes. I am sure there would be other things about the novel, but I seriously have surprised myself by remembering so much already. I do like the title thou.

After the previous two duds that I read, I am happy the third book was much better. Cyberthreat is an ebook and is very short and in places felt tightly packed in, it sometimes needed room to breathe. But it was a fun adventure and contained 10 times more action than the Stony Man i recently finished. Sure, Bolan had armies of nameless baddies to fight which he does so with ease and I wondered how the Russians and Koreans got so many guys into America. The villain, if we can call him that, had a sense of humor, even when Bolan is pushing him around. And I did like how the boastful Iranian hitman was shown the error of his ways and was totally outclassed. So, fun, lots of explosions, a lot of over the top action. Give this one a read!

OMG! Where to start with this? It was tedious. It was replete with continuity errors. The 'tech' was just guff. Phoenix and Able are barely in it. It is repetitious. There were characters who contributed nothing. Seriously, I was bored reading it. There was no tension whatsoever. I kept looking at it the book when I wasn't even half way, thinking that I just did not want to go on. But I stuck with it, hoping it would get better. It didn't. There were errors like McCarter kills a Chinese guard towards the end of the novel, and takes the dead guy's "subgun". Then, a few pages later, he kills a guard, takes the dead guy's "subgun", and informs Rafael that he has just encountered his first guard. In the same sequence, Hawkins has a Beretta that becomes a Glock, that becomes a Beretta. And so it went on. There was an Apache character who, I have no idea why he was involved other than he was in Zero Option (which I read a long time ago and never reviewed). He is such a whizz that he has the latest "Apple phone with ALL THE APPS INSTALLED". Yes, all of them. Wow, what a techie. Able has two minor gunfights, Phoenix has one. In between there is so much repetition about how marvelous Saul Kaplan is and how wonderful Doug on the space platform is. Pages and pages of the characters all thinking the same thing. The Chinese characters were no better. Constantly thinking the same thing over and over again. Uggh. After reading this, with its errors and dullness I wonder why I bother reading these books at all. And to think I paid for this back in the day. The was the penultimate book in the series, before Able and Phoenix were retired for good, and it is clearly understandable why.

I can't say much about this novel that has not already been said. As other reviewers have stated, the writing is juvenile. The characters are awful, especially the three main women. Such stereotypical nonsense. And, yes, the one is the most annoying I have come across in a long time. Oh, and every single character introduced dies. How dull. The story also didn't feel right for its publication date. The author's knowledge of computers and cell phones was very 1990, 12 years out of date. There is not a lot more I can say abut it. Other than it being a small time mission and not a 'save the universe'story, it didn't have a lot going for it.

In a way I kind of enjoyed this story. Bolan going up against regular "normal" street gangs is better than the more farfetched 'nuke of the week' stories. Unfortunately, it is once again what is called a cookie cutter and has been done a thousand times by this author. Rescue a woman, sniper scene, travelling from location to location to rattle the cages without any effort, the allied cop dying at the end. All been done before. So, an unoriginal story, nothing special or remarkable in it, but for some reason I did enjoy it. Maybe because the cookie cutting was in a smaller format, rather than a larger and more dragged-out novel.

I really enjoyed this story, despite it sometimes feeling comic bookish. Bolan is surrounded by outlandish characters and allies, which is often a hallmark of a Chuck Rogers novel. We have Mexican wrestlers turned drug smuggler turned good guy, along with his girlfriend, then an ex special forces Russian drunk, followed by another Russian special forces and on it goes. We, the reader, are not really sure what the bad guys are up to. The cultists want to smuggle a dirty nuclear weapon into the US to do what exactly? And where? And why? We are not told. Similarly, the cultists have a mad scientist (a cardboard character) on the International Space Station with some bad germs, but what he is doing and how and why also isn't explained. Akira gets to go up on the space shuttle to stop him. So, a vague plot. However, the action sequences were wonderful, I especially liked the Moscow gunfight. But the action in Mexico and Argentina were equally good. I have also seen in previous reviews of Chuck Rogers novels that time and distance were never considered, in fact it became a bit of a running joke with some reviewers. Not this time as we are told how long it took Bolan and pals to get from A to B, so I guess the author must have listened :) A fun adventure and I do recommend it.

So the villain, Vogelsand, is a rich German who has the usual holdups about his home country going to rack and ruin so is going to do something about it.....but we are not really sure what the grand plan is. There is a ham fisted assassination attempt on the President and the German Chancellor (they get whisked away during the attempt and are virtually forgotten about). What we do have is a never ending supply of henchmen for Bolan to shoot. Bolan enters the story looking for a missing FBI lady in Monaco. For some reason Leo Turrin is with him and acts like a super commando. Why Turrin and not one of the Able or Phoenix guys wasn't explained. It didn't matter anyway as Turrin was as cardboard as the henchmen he was shooting at. Bolan and friends follow the trail to Algeria then off to the USA to shoot more henchmen before finishing in the Caribbean to shoot more henchmen. So, in reality there was not much storyline. I will give the book 7 stars as it wasn't badly written and there were not too many errors (Grimaldi is 'short' but on one page 'has long legs' and can 'hoove it').

This story was okay but was not as mind blowing for me as for other reviewers, and I was disappointed by the inclusion of the 'dirty bomb' towards the end of the novel as it seemed that the author came up with the ending at the last moment, and rushed it in. The Blackhawk helicopter on the front cover is not in the story by the way. However, this novel was miles better than the previous one that I read by the author - Shock Tactic - and the Turkish village sequence was well done. But a rushed ending and the nuke of the week spoiled it all for me.

This title is a bit different as Bolan goes after a small time Russian drug smuggling ring. There are gangsters to shoot at but not hoards of them. So the fact that it is small scale earns kudos. However there are a lot of failings. To start, by page 15 we find that everybody is a sex pest, including Bolan, who cannot keep his eyes of the Russian woman's chest. We are reminded of this throughout the novel. The DEA cop, Johnny Seven, didn't seem to have any problems going off solo with Bolan, shooting anything that moves. But I kind of liked the character, so there is that. But after the action in America, the story moves to London which felt jarring. And in London it went wrong for me. I lived in London for a while, and notice that this book was published in 2004 so probably written the year before, which means the author was using information that was at least 10 years out of date at the time. His descriptions of the police, the "fog" and other things was noticeable. As well as giving Bolan a car that does not exist in Britain. As others have pointed out, the Chechen assassin was well done and worth the read. But the rest of the story just plodded along.

And again I am swimming against the tide. I really liked this one. The fact that the teams, including Bolan, went on a joint mission through Europe was enjoyable, the only downside was that some characters were barely given any page time. That the teams had to really search for clues and information by investigation and small scale gun battles was also interesting. We also are not introduced to the villain until well past page 100, leaving this reader wondering who was behind it all. So I thought this was a good adventure and well worth reading. After the last Executioner I read this was like a breath of fresh air and I breezed thou it in 3 days. I agree that Bolan should not have shot the dirty cops, and yes, the warship story line fizzled when it could have been more interesting. The villain could have also been a little less generic. There is an inaccuracy on page 58 "But several of them from EU member nations were protesting being sent back...demanded to be allowed to remain in Europe as free workers." If a person is an EU citizen then there is nowhere to deport them to with in the EU. They are always free workers. That is how the EU works. The freedom to live and work in any EU country. The entire paragraph on page 58 is inaccurate.

And once again I am going against the flow here. Things I liked - The cover painting is great. I love the look of determination in both characters eyes. Things I hate - All the rest of it. The book starts in Thessaloniki, a Greek city that I have visited. The story then moves to Athens, on to Britain then back to Athens. This is not a Greece I recognize. Even tho this book is 20 years old it is still not a Greece I recognize. It is as if the author did either zero research or referenced a guide book that was from the 1950's. The Greeks are all peasants who cannot afford rail travel. We are constantly reminded that 'Athens was a dirty city'. Seriously, did you see New York 20 years ago (before 9/11)? Pot calling the kettle black here. I hated every bit of the Greek side of the story and would not pass this book onto any of my Greek friends. It was so bad. Then we move to England and once again we are treated to a lack of research. The author gets British politicians titles wrong, and there is no need for this. There was internet and Google in 2001 when I assume this was being written. We have a character call Sir Ridley Brigmart and the author constantly refers to the character as Sir Brigmart instead of Sir Ridley. There is a singer called Sir Tom Jones. It is Sir Tom, not Sir Jones. There is MI6 operating and investigating on British soil - that is the job of MI5. Then we have a wonderful moment on page 152 "..that is punishable by death here, you know." The British have not had the death penalty since the 1950's. I wanted to throw the book across the room. After that we return to Athens for more rubbish and hey ho, it is all over after taking me a week to get throu.

Surprisingly still a topical story, even tho it was written 20 years ago. Not much has changed in Myanmar to date the novel. Stony Man are brought into an advneture that at first sight is quite low level, but quickly develops into the rogue government of Myanmar getting their hands on 1950's hydrogen bombs. Phoenix Force are sent to Thailand and Myanmar, with Able Team first running around the States before going to Myanmar to wrap the adventure up. It wasn't a far fetched story and in its way quite enjoyable. However, and this is on me, I found it slow going. I was frequently lost on the names of all the characters, confusing the rebel leaders with the CIA helpers. My fault, not the author. As a result it took me about two weeks to get thro the story. If there is a fault than it was with the military equipment. The author did not know, and hadn't researched his helicopters. Frequently we would have the entire teams climb into an Apache or the European equivalent of an Apache. Come om, only two people fit in an Apache, not Phoenix Force and Able Team. So this was nonsense. Similar mistakes were made with aircraft as well. But all in all I liked this story.

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

First the good points: Carl Lyons shags a 19 year old university student. (I think that is good, right?) This is a big story contained inside a small novel and really needed to be given room to breath in a larger novel, but this was written in the days before Stony Man novels appeared. The bad guys are a cabal of generals and admirals who want to turn our country into a fascist military run paradise under the pretense that civilians just can't hack it. A senator learns some small detail of the plot then passes it onto a friend at the CIA who contacts Able Team. The first big action sequence is when Able Team escape from the Wolf's Tooth base and are pursued through the desert. It is excellent reading. The second action sequence is the main assault on Wolf's Tooth and is equally excellent although it suffers from the page count. Again a bigger novel would have been better. The characters are surprisingly well rounded for such a short novel. I actually liked the CIA guy. And extra kudos for the regret and sadness that Able Team suffered when they had to kill US soldiers in battle. Very well done. But the bad..... It seems that everybody and their dog knows about Able Team, knows their names, knows what they do and know where they live. Although Stony Man Farm is barely mentioned in the book. So much for a secret organisation. Even a journalist knew all about them. For the final battle Able Team ring around to gather a team of mercenaries together run by a Colonel or Captain Black - the rank kept changing. So what happened to the Farm? What happened to Phoenix Force or Mack Bolan? The situation is serious but Able Team cannot be bothered to phone home. It seems that the author was totally unaware of their existence. Also irritating was that Carl Lyons seemed to morph from being in the police to being in the military. A pet peeve was that the author kept going on about the Vietnam war. On and on it went, and every character in the book apart from the university girl had been there, skinning Vietcong alive. I get that this book was written about fifteen years after the American military retreat, but it really did not need to be mentioned on every other page. It did drag the story down a little.

Looks like I am going to be the odd guy out again and not like this one whereas the other reviewers enjoyed it. Let's start with the cover. A cartoon cockpit? Oh, come on! The Land Rover in the book is described as 'open top' yet the one here is roofed? And what the hell does a Range Rover and palm trees have to do with anything? Sloppy cover art by the publisher. The book bored me. Sorry to say it but it did. Took me three weeks to get throu. I kept putting it down and reading something else. The writing style was choppy, the short sentences distracting. The book also didn't know what it wanted to be. It starts as a spy thriller with McCarter skulking around London. Then turns to hostage rescue before thinking it is the Hunt for Red October. There it failed. We are expected to believe that only Stony Man would be concerned about a stolen Russian submarine. No mention of NATO or the Russians going on full alert. Nothing. Instead we wait around for Phoenix Force to traipse around Afghanistan. Hell, yeah. What rubbish. Then we have the travel situation. McCarter flies from London back to Stony Man to pick up PF, then they fly to Afghanistan, then to Oman, then to Somalia. Able get from NYC to Siberia to the Barents Sea, and all the while the chief villain, who is made out to be some charismatic guy, sits around with his thumb up his ass doing nothing. The book bored me. It was a trial to get throu it. I did, but it was a struggle. Give this one a miss. The fight on the ship with Able Team was pretty good, and they did go to Siberia, so there is that.

I enjoyed this for the most part. The entire story takes place in and around Acapulco where a cult is trying to muscle in on the drug cartels and then plot to take over the entire crime scene in Mexico. The cover of the book is a little bland, but the portrait of Anibella is really good and I kept going back just to look at her. For me the stand out scenes was with the fight with the kommodo dragons, a giant pair of lizards whose regular diet is live humans. The fight was a little far fetched but incredibly fast paced. Anibella as a villain was awesome, both seductive and more than a little crazy. Bolan also has some good allies in this adventure. There are references to past adventures, including the Border Fire trilogy in the Executioner series which I have yet to read. But otherwise this was a good entry and to be recommended.

I forgot to review this title which I read 2 weeks ago. I do seem to gravitate towards Jon Guenther's books which must mean I like them, but this one failed to stick in my mind. The fact that Bolan and friends stayed in Cuba instead of globe hopping I did appreciate. The problem is that the Havana Five were meant to be some kind of fearsome alliance holding off the Mexican and Colombian drug cartels yet there was hardly any challenge for Bolan. Havana Five just turned out to be another gang of hoodlums to breeze through. I also wasn't convinced by the revenge story, the widow didn't seem to be as driven by hatred as was suggested. All in all it was an easy to read story, posed no challenges for Bolan, and in my case was instantly forgettable. As an addition, the helicopter on the cover is the wrong color and seems to be photoshopped from another cover as there is writing behind the helicopter.

From the back cover "Ukrainian militants are the initial suspects in a terrorist attack on Washington DC, until rumors surface suggesting Moscow was behind the bombing." Except the second part of that sentence is not in the book. Which was disappointing as I was expecting something else. The Lincoln Memorial is the location of a terrorist attack and the next day Brognola hands a list to Bolan of locations in Manhattan where Ukrainian and Russian gangsters can be found. The follows the usual of setting the gangs against each other, sniper scenes etc. The terrorist attack is forgotten. Bolan then flies of to Ukraine and repeats the same, setting gangs against each other, blowing up warehouses etc. The terrorist attack is forgotten. Moscow's involvement is non existent. I did kind of enjoy the Manhattan scenes but that was when I was expecting the story to go somewhere. The second half was just boring. It is a shame that the story was advertised as something it wasn't and I went in believing that it would be far more topical than it actually was.

By the end of this adventure Phoenix Force are down to one man and Able have two. Everybody else is in hospital having their limbs replaced and vital organs transplanted. The adventure rushed along and I mainly enjoyed Calvin James' solo adventures in France and Venezuela. The lawyer scenes with Calvin James were very funny. Rafael and Gary Manning hook up with the remnants of Able to launch an assault on a Zeta compound in Mexico where Gary breaks his leg (and then somehow manages to get himself to France to assist Calvin James and gets around okay with a leg in a cast - bizarrely the broken leg is credited to Calvin for a paragraph before Manning gets it back). The plot isn't very clear, there is mention of the main villain speculating on the US dollar and hoping to sink the currency by launching chemical weapons on the U.S. but this is only in a single sentence. But where this story fell down for me was the old time & distance equation. One moment Phoenix are in Marseilles, France, and then we hear that McCarter is on a medical ship in the Gulf of Oman and the prisoner is on Diego Garcia - all of which are half a world away from where they were. Then two of Phoenix show up in Stony Man and off they are to Mexico. It kind of felt like Game of Thrones' final season where characters moved effortlessly around a continent. Characters would move vast distances with out regard for time. Very off putting. Love the cover but not sure what it had to do with the story as no missile was fired at the little UAV that Carmen was controlling. Also Mack Bolan puts in a cameo.

"Loggers! Logging! If the lumberjacks can't chop down virgin forest then house prices will rise and we'll all be doomed!" A bit of an exaggeration but that is the hook that Brognola uses to get Bolan in on the act. A "green" terrorist group intends to get up to all sort of hairbrained things that don't really make sense and Bolan needs to stop them. The terrorists could have been replaced by Arabs of the week and it wouldn't have made any difference to the story. And boy is the story dated and out of touch. Bolan is worried about the loggers and chemical companies and how will they make enough profit. He is saddled with an FBI lady who is so cardboard I have already forgotten her name. Bolan blunders from gunfight to gunfight relying on coincidences such as local newspaper reports to give him clues. Then he has a stupid ride on the outside of the stolen submarine as it dives deep and later comes back up with no hint of the bends. There are a lot of things I could say about this book including the authors obsession with the name Garth and how he reuses the name for villains in later books but why bother. I did not like this book at all. Not one bit, even thou I stuck with it until the end. "Won't somebody think of the loggers!?"

I am so split over this adventure. On one hand it is like a Jason Bourne movie, full of spies, double crosses, fist fights, car chases and helicopter assaults across the crowded city of Grozny. The plot involves missing laptops, stolen secrets and moles in high places wrapped in corruption and greed. On the other hand I didn't quite understand why Bolan was involved. He is sent into Grozny to recover a laptop with details of global terrorist networks and then, once that has failed, becomes involved in the antics of two corrupt CIA officials who are selling secrets and another CIA agent who has disappeared. But Bolan does involve himself and becomes Jason Bourne. Which isn't a bad thing for the movie but it isn't Bolan and he is out of character. Take the car chase through Grozny. Bolan steers his car with one hand while blasting away with an Uzi at the car he is pursing, while shoppers and commuters try to dodge the bullets. Bolan wouldn't open fire if there was a chance of civilians being injured. Here he just doesn't care who gets hurt or killed. There are several instances of this sort of thing throughout the book including saying nothing as a Russian partner shoots several police officers. The plot is too convoluted for this small book. It would work in a large thriller like a Robert Ludlum, but here it feels confusing and is padded out with too many action scenes for a spy thriller. It is a case of Ludlum meets Pendleton and the mix just didn't stick for me. Also, what has the title, Rebel Force, got to do with anything? Was there a page featuring Chechen rebels that I missed?

This should have been called War Everlasting as the phrase is used about 20 times in the first few chapters. As it is Time to Kill is used once but could equally be called Time to Die of Boredom. The story takes place over 3 days I think, but it is hard to tell as it took me well over a week to work my way thru it. It is just so slow. And it isn't that that there are not many action scenes as I could live with that as long as there was a strong story but there isn't. It is just chapter upon chapter of musings. Bolan muses for a chapter. Then Rachel muses for the next chapter, then MacAllister muses for a chapter and so it goes on and on. I agree with the other reviewers about the giant and the mask. Why? And why wasn't this giant given a back story? Was he Scottish? Russian? Adopted? MacAllister's inbred cousin? Who knows. At least the giant wasn't musing for a chapter so I guess that's something. Some small highlights: The Double 0 Section is mentioned and the 2 MI5 agents use the same guns as James Bond in his various adventures. This gave the story an extra star. And the author did seem to know his way around Scotland which made things a bit more interesting.

I did like this story with its shades of Hunt for Red October. The three main parts of the story dealt with Manning in the enemy camp, Grimaldi on the run in the jungle and PF trying to find their missing colleagues. of these I found the Grimaldi story to be the most interesting, with the PF story being the weakest. The guys acted really unprofessionally for so called experts, including shouting at each other when sneaking up on enemy positions. I guess I would have liked to see more techno thriller in the story rather than how much coca-cola McCarter can guzzle before going into battle (seriously, have you ever tried running with a belly full of cola? It hurts). But the story lost points for its rubbish ending. Rather than have Grimaldi fly the Russian jet out of Guatemala and McCarter fly the drragon slayer, it now turns out that McCarter is a fully qualified jet fighter pilot and this he learnt when in the British SAS. This was total rubbish, including the air combat with a KGB agent who is also a fighter pilot. Complete nonsense and it loses a couple of stars for me.

"...where liberals could hang out and ignore reality." page 81. Strange thing to say and I feel it is a case of the pot calling the kettle black, even 23 years ago when this book was written. I found this story to be bland. There was no real challenge for the various teams. PF spent the book in Northern Ireland, AT in New York and New Orleans, and Bolan managed to fly from Australia (where there was a nonsensical gunfight) to Japan to Jamaica to Stony Man and then join up with the rest of the gang to fly to the Caribbean. The timelines did not match up. I am not too sure why Stony Man were involved in the first place. Sure, guns were being manufactured and illegally distributed but so are a lot of weapons around the world. But somehow they got involved. Colonel Maddox spent the book being a dick of a villain and his henchmen were not that good. Guess I was not overly impressed with this one.

Two things struck me in this book, the final one of the Stony Man series. First, the title should have been Bloodbath because that is exactly what it is. Second, this book should have come with a disclaimer informing the reader that it is almost a direct sequel to another Stony novel, Cold Snap which I have not read and do not possess. The characters constantly bang on about it throughout and it is extremely distracting. What also feeds into this is that the reader also needs to be completely familiar with all of GH Frost's Able Team novels as well as numerous Stony novels that are referred to, of which I have only read Extreme Arsenal. If I had been aware that such knowledge was required to understand half of what was going on I would have given this one a miss for a long while. For me it started going wrong in chapter 3 where half of the chapter was dedicated to talking about previous adventures and making huge leaps in logic and the other half was dedicated to gun porn where every weapon of every team member is described in excruciating detail. Throughout the rest of the book we are treated to exactly what these weapons can do and even more excruciating detail of what the various bullets do to the human body. Paragraphs and paragraphs of it. I was skip reading whole pages at one point where we are told about brains splattering everywhere for the 77th time. The point of the story just gets completely lost as we are forced to wade through blood and gore. I should point out that Carl Lyons is referred to as the leader of Phoenix Force at least twice and Lao Ti shows up to kill and manages to be in two places at once at one point. But there are some real good points and I kinda wish that these had been more developed. The whole senate commission looking into Stony Man Farm and the information that they had including on John Phoenix was thrilling and could have been further explored, especially as this was the final Stony Man novel. We could have seen the Farm on the brink of closure or exposure (since the bad guys knew almost everything about it). Unfortunately we get Brognola figuring out that 2 senators are the enemy because they are asking questions he does not like. No "maybe they are being played and fed info from anonymous sources". Nope, they are out and out bad guys because they do not see things from Brognola's point of view. Disappointing. It was cool to see the fictional president pooping his pants as he worries about the potential exposure, tho. But the majority of the book is just shooting and bodies exploding and general carnage which was a chore to get thru. I really wanted it to end, fed up with non stop carnage and references to numerous references to past adventures. These books are meant to entertain, and this one did not.

And so here it is. The final Executioner story. Probably the final ever. It is just a regular adventure. We can't blame the author as he almost certainly did not know at the time of writing. There is no riding off into the sunset here, no deciding to retire, or take it easy for a while, let younger guns handle the weight of the world. Instead we are treated to a blood vortex of near non stop shooting where Bolan never runs out of ammo. The leader of Venezuela (was it El Presidente Chavez still alive or not? I was confused) has a hair brained scheme about gathering representatives of a load of terrorist groups together for a pow-wow and maybe they will all be friends and....do something? So they all show up to a hotel complex in the middle of nowhere. Enter Mack Bolan and an Israeli agent who for some reason is working alone and together they run around shooting and strafing and throwing grenades through bathroom windows until most of the bad guys are dead and then catch a plane flight out of the country. And that really is the story. The author does lay down some impressive knowledge of various terrorist groups but the main problem I have with the story is that so many characters and groups are introduced that I really lost track of who was where and what and why. I manged to remember the Irish, the lady and the army guy in charge but the rest all blurred into one mass and merely became targets for Mack's never ending supply of bullets. As a monthly entry it would have been ok. As it was we waited for six months, get handed an adventure that takes place over a single evening and then The Executioner series ends with a fizzle. Not the author's fault but I think that the publishers had given up the ghost a long time ago. Fortunately for me I have a lot of back issues to work throu, but I can imagine that some folks will be disappointed.

A small story in a large book, with a lot of stuff added about the Ocean Tigers getting hold of a super-dooper program that can control all satellites and set off nuclear missiles. There was a lot going for the story, including the first half of the book which involved a lot of detective work rather than the old 'rattle the cages' routine. Bolan is saddled with a rather damaged lady to work with and assigned the mission by an ex-president. There is also the surprise of Johnny Bolan Grey joining the adventure, although he is more of a commando here rather than a civilian. But there were a few downers. One, the author displays his lack of computer knowledge. Mine is not great but I do know that you cannot format an active operating system as I have tried this myself. Also, his characters express amazement that a database is run from a hard drive. Of course it is run from a hard drive, where else would it be? His lack of research of weapons also shows through with Bolan running around firing a British bullpup SA80 in all kinds of modes and giving it a folding stock. Plus, until the very end it seems Bolan has forgotten about the existence of Stony Man Farm. Surely one of the Able Team or Phoenix Force guys would be a better assist than his brother. The Tamil Tiger wannabes are weak and their overall plan is virtually non-existent. They just seem to be vagabonds who are into piracy. But otherwise it was an ok adventure.

I got myself a refurbished ipad mini which makes reading these ebooks so much easier. Of Death List I found the first half of the book more enjoyable than the second. Bolan infiltrates the Chicago mafia just like in the old days a proceeds to demolish another mafia clan to prove his loyalty. The group he is infiltrating is run by a husband and wife, two old crones, of which Rosa was the better villain. There is no explanation as to how she became so high up in the organization which is a shame as it would have added a bit of flavor to the story. The second part has Bolan running around the country rescuing various bigwigs from assassination. This was kind of silly as Bolan had no real reason to do this, it could have been handled by any other federal authority and Bolan could have been dealing with other aspects of the mission rather than swinging out of flying Osprey aircraft. Engaging in the knife fight at the end was also silly. Never bring a knife to a gunfight, do they not remember that movie? But otherwise it was an enjoyable romp and way better than the previous book that I read.

The cover is awesome, it really is. Bolan in a downpour with lightening flashing in the background. It is really really good.Four stars for that alone. And kudos to the author for predicting the reunification of Germany four years in advance. But kudos is all he gets because......the rest was just awful. The entire story sucked. We are introduced to various KGB teams, kill crazy CIA agents ("Langley has authorized us to kill everything"), mercenaries, red neck militias, lunatics and the McGuffin double agents. There are no defining characteristics between any of the groups, all we get are chapters and chapters that are basically the following: WAR!WAR!WAR!WAR!HATE!HATE!HATE!HATE!HATE!HATE!HATE! It goes on and on and on. I skipped pages of it. I almost gave up with the so called story but stuck with it. Seriously, you can give this one a miss. Get it only for the cover. But after this I may give Bolan a rest for a while. It was that bad.

I forgot to review this book. I finished it two weeks ago and, like the story, went completely out of my mind. From what I remember, the story went something like: POTUS: I am worried about a treaty and somebody is causing trouble. Bolan: Don't care. POTUS: It must be this Valdez guy in Mexico, for no other reason then he is in Mexico. Go shoot him and anything that moves. Bolan: Okay then. And Bolan goes to Mexico, shoots anything that moves. Recruits twin brothers/civilians and manages to get one of them killed. Oh and get Valdez who is a very shallow character - a former marine or ranger or something, he doesn't like what he sees in Grenada, what we are not told, and decides to go rogue. That's it. No mention of drug cartels so I guess they did not exist yet. The embassy shoot out was okay, otherwise there was nothing to mention.

This was a good adventure. Mainly Phoenix in action in Israel where radical Jewish tech guys are intent on ridding the world of Arabs using high tech weaponry. Able has a smaller but impressive role in Louisiana with Lyons being taken out of action and in Israel Rafe gets badly injured. If I had a complaint then it would be the repetitious description of the OICW rifle. That got boring real quick, along with the marvels of Windows NT (I had to look up what that looked like). But otherwise I found this to be a well written story.

A solid 8 from me. This is the way an Executioner should be done. A solo mission, an American city, criminal cartels without a nuke in sight, a visit to the local police chief to get him onside. Add that to some great characters who are not unbelievable, along with car chases, shoot outs and parachute jumps and you have a great adventure. The only slight issue that I had was of Stony Man HQ muscling in on the action and getting kudos from the president afterwards. Otherwise a fine tale, and I even liked the cover.

Looks like I am going against all the other reviews here. I thought this was awful. No story line and populated by blockheads and dunderheads. Years ago I saw this Brit sitcom set in war time France and all factions and characters were idiots. The same is true here. The 'story' is set in LA, and there was me thinking that Able Team handled adventures set in the USA. There were chapters that introduced characters only for them to get shot and never mentioned again. The book opens with Phoenix Force pitting their skills against a robot and the robot is using live ammo! Seriously? And we even get to hear what the robot is thinking. What junk. I will give the book 5 stars for the great wrap around cover. Otherwise the story is junk. MERGE are a joke. The KGB are a joke. Phoenix Force were Keystone Kops. And the genius of a 13 year kid was poorly handled. And WTF does the title even mean and what relevence does it have on the non existent story?

I wanted to like this one but in the end it fell kind of flat. The story is an old tried and tested on of the author, a kidnapping takes place and Bolan goes and rattles the cages of various factions until something happens. Instead of some girlfriend getting grabbed it is Hal Brognola, who is mistaken for somebody else and snatched. This could have worked so well in a short novel/ebook, but it didn't gel and felt rather rushed as if it needed a rewrite. Bolan's escapades are told by third parties so we do not get into much action and as such the middle section dragged. We spend too long musing with the Psychopath when he could have remained more of a mystery. The final chase at the end is unclear as the author knows he is running out of page space. And how Bolan located the Psychopath at the end remains a mystery. So it could have worked, it should have worked, but it needed more development and the author sadly invested little time into it. That's my feeling, anyway.

Very much an "episode of the week" style of adventure. A small Texas town has a local drug baron who seems to like killing people with a baseball bat. This is witnessed by his Mexican gardener who then flees to Mexico to hide. Bolan is brought in to rescue the witness and bring the local drug baron to justice while evading a Mexican cartel that have been brought in to kill the witness. For Bolan it is all too easy and there is little to no challenge. The Mexican goons are near incompetent and fall easily to Bolan's marksmanship. The cartel leader is a lunatic who rants and yells and does little else. What is not clear is why did Bolan feel that rescuing the witness was enough. He could have easily gone after the Texas gangster once the Mexican cartel was wiped out. So no real hardship for Bolan, just a run of the mill mission, but there were no real flaws either (why didn't the witness simply email the video footage to the Justice dept? Why didn't the Justice dept request this at the beginning?) so all in all an ok adventure.

The good first - this was one rollercoaster ride of an adventure. There was hardly space to breathe and I found myself wanting to read more Chuck Roger's Stony Man adventures (there are only 3). The story moves from Poland to Sweden, back to Poland then onto Belize followed by a quick visit to the Californian coast, and the picture on the cover really does happen. The guest characters are over the top, especially Propenko and Demi, followed by Paulus although they all seemed to get man crushes on Calvin very quickly. The t-shirt joke resonated throughout the book. The action was intense, especially the scenes in Poland. Just, wow! And Able Team go to Poland! The bad second - start with the back cover. Out of the author's control but what is described is only the final third of the book. The country the action takes place in is Belize and not Grenada as stated, and thanks for giving the plot away as to what is being 3D printed. Obviously written by monkeys. Why did Poland happen? What was the point? Why were the villains there? Why was the Game Room there? Despite being the best part of the book, the Polish part made no sense at all. It didn't advance the villain's agenda at all, despite Phoenix Force being there a week already. Then there was Liberty City. After the intensity of Poland, Liberty was like running into a brick wall. The action turned into slow moving storyline and there was little of it. And the ending off San Francisco was very rushed. But the biggest problem I had was the character flaws of Phoenix Force. Rafael is now called Fish, and Manning is known as Gummer. The whole book was Fish! Fish! Fish! Gummer! Gummer! Gummer! Where did these rubbish nicknames come from? We are not told. But it was jarring. Then we learn that, and I quote from page 269 "McCarter was SAS, Her Majesty's Royal Navy" and on page 290 "as a sailor himself". McCarter has never been a sailor, he was always a soldier. Where did this rubbish come from and how did the editors let it through? For the Polish segment alone this book would have been a 10 but the errors I listed above brought it down to a solid 8.

Strange thing on page 185, the same paragraph is repeated twice. I enjoyed the story, but I do have to agree with the other reviewers. For a short novel it took me ages to get through and I cannot say why. It seemed such slow going. Yet the characters on all sides were well written and interesting, the storyline itself was good. The villains did somehow identify that The Executioner was after them, but nothing was made of this again which is unfortunate. So all in all a good story but a slow reader.

I almost forgot to review this. I found the story instantly forgettable, and I struggle to remember the plot a week after I read it. So it takes place in Israel and Jordan, and Bolan is able to rescue one person in a terrorist bombing out of hundreds and it turns out to be the sister of the female Mossad agent he gets to work with. No coincidence there. The bad guy that is to be deported, Kamal, is quite pathetic and I didn't understand why he would have so many followers. I equally didn't understand why such a high value prisoner would be held at an un-defendable camp either. But several of the supporting characters did have a personality so that made up for the plot holes. This would get a 6.5 from me.

Unlike other reviewers I could not get as excited by this title. It started out good and I liked the character of the old prospector but the rest of the cast were sadly lacking. The FBI lady was robotic and I was relieved when she was written out of the story. The villains were generic and I could not understand why so many would follow Trevor Garth when he was so cardboard. Being described as charismatic isn't the same things as actually being charismatic. Bolan was just clumsy the whole time, and due to general incompetence and not acting sooner, dozens of FBI guys die horrible deaths. Brognola also almost gets topped off but obviously manages to survive. I found this story to be merely average.

Note to self: avoid Michael A Black's ebooks for a while. Jack Grimaldi is still a jackass, a real Jar-Jar Binks, and Bolan is just a cardboard cutout. For some reason and we are not told why, the dynamic duo are investigating a smuggling ring in Seattle which turns out to be something more. Then begins a chase across Alaska with Bolan always one step behind the bad guys. He is joined a beautiful Russian agent from a previous adventure, I think Deadly Salvage, and together they shoot their way thru the villains. But the ending has a huge plot hole as the Canadians know that the bad guys have bubonic plague on the Lear jet yet no jet fighters are scrambled to escort the plane in. The Canadians just provide a couple of police sergeants and allow the dynamic trio and hangers on to shoot everything to shit. It was a struggle to get through this story, even though it is a short novel.

I enjoyed this story. No over the top villains or terrorists, the bad guys are all former Mossad agents armed with sophisticated nuclear bombs and are out to stop Israel's enemies getting the upper hand in a potential war. Phoenix and Able are deployed to prevent this and are actually defending their traditional enemies from an ally. Able get sent to Iraq and Iran and that is worth the price of the book alone. I did wonder, at the end, how Able would be able to extract from Iran with a wounded Gadgets. That wasn't mentioned. If there is a criticism then it is that Calvin James was not mentioned at all in any way up until page 166. He is an invisible man. Nobody notices that he is not around or is around. Then, suddenly, he is sitting in a car next to McCarter. Obviously the author forgot all about the character. Something similar happened earlier in the book where Rafael is constantly referred to as 'the driver'. Very annoying.

Wow! Me giving a Mike Newton a 9. A well deserved 9 as well. This story (the cover is slightly misleading as the 'cartel' are not the usual Columbians or drug dealing gangs but three board room bankers) is very different from the normal copy and paste fair and how I wish Mike Newton could have written more stories like this one. The adventure has more of a Die Hard/Under Siege feel to it as Bolan is more or less trapped in a winter storm in a cold monastery as a international team of mercenaries move in to eliminate the witness and all the monks. Bolan parachutes out of a plane into the heart of the storm, gets stuck in a tree then trudges through waist deep snow to reach the monastery. I must also give a shout out to the mercenaries as all of them were interesting characters, not cardboard cut-outs for Bolan to shoot. The only reason for keeping the book from being a 10 is that the ending is rather rushed and leaves a number of loose ends, I really wanted to know about the aftermath of the battle at the monastery but that was lost to a sniper sequence where Bolan is suddenly and jarringly in New York mere hours after the battle. But I really do recommend this book.

Even Mack Bolan did not like this mission. To start with, this is not a Stony Man novel, it is Bolan, McCarter with Rafael, Gary and Gadgets tagging along. Bolan the recruits a character from a previous adventure, called Meiko, that seems to enjoy killing and no reason is given for her being there in place of Able Team or Phoenix Force. So Bolan and friends are led around by two Indonesians, one a soldier and the other a spy to stop a revolution from happening. That eventually turns out to be the Chinese up to no good, but before that it isn't really clear why Bolan accepted the mission or what Stony Man were really doing there. POTUS seemed to be bothered by it but I would have thought that it was a job for the State Department. Oh well, this was mediocre and can be given a miss.

Oh, this was so much better than the previous Bolan I read. There was a plot! There were believable villains. There were realistic locations! As well as lots of shooting and running around. Carl Lyons is in half of the adventure before....well, read it yourself! I only have one or two complaints. Small ones. There was a lot of jumping around in time and locations. One page Bolan is in LA, the next he is at Stony Man. Did he get beamed over? Also, what happened to the high priced whore, Soledad? Did she die off page as one of the villains stated, or did Bolan get to the island just in time? We will never know!

The story could have been so much better. The potential was there with Rafael going rogue to hunt down his brother but the follow up was poor. Rafael seemed too unprofessional, his judgement flawed, which lead to the deaths of a number of his friends. The rest of Phoenix track him down in the middle of the jungle, arriving just in time to join in the firefight and save Rafael from death. But there are no consequences for Rafael, no discipline or castigation. An easy read but a shallow one.

Wow, reading the previous reviews it seems like I am the odd bunny out here. I found this to be trash and that is exactly where my tatty old copy finds itself. In the paper trash where it belongs. The characters are cardboard throughout, no background, no motivation, no nothing. Why is the Vulture who he is, and what was his name? Who cares. He has a numpty for a second in command and hundreds of mercenaries at his beck and call who are all to willing to die for him. At one point, when Bolan goes full Rambo, the bodies were "stacked ten feet high". What rubbish. The female characters he meets along the way are instantly forgettable and often just disappear. The computer guy goes from being a coward to Rambo II in no time. And stupid things happen like Bolan jumping out of a exploding helicopter and landing on top of a hot air balloon. But what got me was the 15 years ago intro. Wasn't 1982 when Bolan became Colonel John Phoenix and the terrorist wars started? Was there any mention of this? No, because the intro might as well as been a month ago. But we are expected to believe that 15 years later the Vulture is still the most wanted person in the world and Bolan has been carrying a grudge ever since. For 15 years? Come on, get real. A real trash story.

I enjoyed this one. A realistic plot (although the motivations of the villains was not explained; what did they hope to achieve?) but no far fetched plot involving robots or space shuttles. The two teams are knocked about and have to work with members missing or seriously injured. The terrorists are well developed which was good (I disagree with a previous reviewer on that). The Iraqi's were a bit lame and could have been left out. But one star off for the stupid hospital scene which everybody else has commented on. The same hospital, yes, but the same hospital room? Seriously?

I kind of liked this one but at the same time it felt lacking, perhaps due to page constraints. The drug lord's henchman, Tragg, was a great villain and I would have liked a more protracted scene between him and Bolan towards the end. The plot was a little convoluted and the art work of the story is a bit of a McGuffin as it has little relevance to the overall plot. The author still does not get Grimaldi and portrays him as a mouthy sex mad nut who is incapable of being professional. Unfortunately the ending was a bit rushed and the death of the drug lord a bit to convenient.

So the dog fight on the cover doesn't actually happen which is disappointing. Instead we have the author's third entry in the series and having read later Bolan's of his I can see that this is a template. There is very little story line, wicked Chinese have cut of all communications in Hawaii and if the US doesn't allow them to have Taiwan then everybody will be really, really sorry. And that is it. What could have been a SuperBolan with Tom Clancy style politics and military posturing in the background instead is turned into a John Woo party as Bolan goes from location to location shooting two handed, in slow motion, never missing and never getting injured. It does get tedious. And, of course, the Chinese agents are all very type cast. So on the whole I'd say this one is merely average.

Again an ebook on my ipad that weighs as much as a hardback copy of Lord of the Rings. Maybe that took away my enjoyment of this story. Maybe not. But this entry was a bit bland and characterless. Pablo Escobar has been sighted in Columbia and Mack Bolan is sent in to shoot anything that moves. With help from Grimaldi whose position would have been better served by a member of Phoenix Force or Able Team. There is a female spy involved who provides Bolan with a list of targets and of course she gets kidnapped and needs rescuing but hey ho it is a Mike Newton and he has copyright in such matters. And yes the 'book' is only 186 pages or so but the story just felt so thin and padded in places which was a shame as it had potential to be so much more. But unfortunately it is a by-the-numbers and has been done so many times before by the author.

A thin plot, cartoonish villains and Phoenix Force investigating a heist with bullets. There should be a lot to dislike in this story but surprisingly I enjoyed it once I got past the repetitive re-introduction of the main characters and how they all like to tote different weapons on their jaunts. A straight A to B adventure with no surprises or insights and delivered with a lot of bullets.

I loved the cover, which is probably the best thing about the book which took me a week to complete. The story is a bit of a confusing mess when it should have been a straight A to B adventure. There is a mess of cardboard characters and I had frequent difficulty identifying who was who as the Tibetan gangsters were the same as were the Russian agents. Bolan was lead around by a CIA woman who seemed to have dubious motivations early on in the story but these vanished by the end and a retired super secret agent that is legendary and everybody knows by name but he has never ever been mentioned before. Also the guy has unconvincing memory issues that never seemed to be real. But the main issue that I had was the vehicles. The author didn't seem to know what a B2 stealth bomber looks like as it is described as having a tail and a fuselage and the stolen truck with the nuclear weapon seemed to changed from having a missile on a trailer to being a bomb in a crate in a normal truck to morphing back again. This, along with the cardboard villains made the story disjointed. And I so wanted to enjoy it. But I do love the cover.

Ok so there is nothing new to read here as Mike Newton has done the same plot before and would continue to do so for another million years. I agree with the other reviewers here about the sniper scene, the kidnapped girl, the two useless villains reacting in the same way they always do. However I did enjoy this for some reason. The story hasn't aged that much other than the characters looking for pay phones and Tommy Anders makes a welcome return although I don't remember him ever waving machine guns around. of course he is there to provide Bolan with a 'list' of targets and happens to know all of the passwords and codes and where everybody will be at a certain time. I did like the fact that Bolan leaves his marksman's medal lying around and the Triads discover who is after them. That saved a star in the review.

Ok, so this book took me about three weeks to get through. The first half dragged and I was reluctant to pick it up. But I did push on and the second half breezed by. Phoenix and Able are already in the middle of a story when we join them and this is probably what jarred so much. Also it felt very much that this time the Teams were in a clean up operation and not so much worried about the who and why. The villains did make and appearance at the end of the book but by then it felt unnecessary. The bombs had been defused, Able Team had flown across the Atlantic to do very little and Phoenix were finishing off the bad guys. There were some great moments in the adventure, including McCarter being shot at from all sides in the kitchen and Gadgets going solo thinking he is Mack Bolan and very nearly gets his ass handed to him. But it still felt an incomplete adventure.

I obviously wasn't as engaged in this as previous reviewers were. It was a good story even though I found that The Ghoul killed a little too easily and the psychology was a little amateurish. I do agree that there were only a few hangers on to the Ghoul so this meant the whole book was more of a one on one between Ghoul and the Executioner. It is certainly one to read, but not my favorite to date.

The story wasn't badly written, in fact it was an easy read. The book is shoehorned between parts 1 and 2 of another story, probably for editorial reasons, so doesn't fit that narrative. And judging by the way it makes no mention of past adventures in Central America I would hazard a guess at it taking place 10 books earlier. However, the plot was paper thin and very poorly researched. The author had little grasp on what he was writing or on real world situations. Why would the KGB be in charge of a missile installation and not the GRU? Why would a meer major have the arming codes to fire the rockets at will? That made no sense. And then there was the traitor whose lack of motives made even less sense. And why would a general be ordering the navy around? And how come the author didn't know the difference between an aircraft carrier and a battleship? But it was the Stony Man side of things that jarred the most. The General and his lackey are allowed to wander around the Farm! Brognola takes orders from them! Gadgets teaches the Bear how to use a computer! And most glaring of all, the Bear can walk around normally, but by the end of the book, when he suddenly becomes a master sniper, he is back in the wheelchair!! Added to the voodoo mumbo jumbo and this is a poor entry into the series.

I found it a bit slow and plodding in places, with lots of padding with what the characters are thinking. The story is a bit thin but does work as Bolan tracks down an old army colleague who thinks the gods are talking to him, and has somehow managed to convince enough people to become a militia. The hook to get Washington interested was the release of Ebola, but nothing is made of this until the end. Equally the final confrontation felt a bit of a let down after all the build up and the James Bond style of sitting with the villain and having a meal with him. But otherwise it wasn't too bad an adventure.

Wow, and I do mean Wow! The action in this one does not let up until somewhere around page 120, there is a mission briefing and then it is back to the action. Normally I would prefer a bit of story line but this is contained within the action. The teams are put through the wringer and I am surprised they could still walk at the end of it all. Go read this one! But only nine stars because some parts were rushed or contained plot holes keeping it from being the perfect Stony Man. How did the Teams latch onto the fact that the problems came from Central America? Did I miss something in all the excitement? Maybe, but how did everybody know to call the killer robots 'Anklyosaurs' without being told? Why were Phoenix Force meeting with a CIA agent at Langley? We will never know. How did the Teams know that Fixx was behind it all when we, the readers, had only just been introduced? It was little things like this that kept it from being one of the best for me, however it does get a solid 9 stars and deservedly so.

Well, this was trash, and I disagree with the previous reviews. We are treated throughout the book to such literary gems as "...Derrick Anderson's lifeless body. Bolan could tell things did not look good for Mr Anderson." No shit, Sherlock. Sentences and phrases were used repetitively within the same paragraphs, which left me wondering if the book was edited at all or even completely and badly edited by an over enthusiastic editor. The story was flimsy, all of the characters cardboard and the action was a drudge to read. Again repetitive descriptions of shots to the head and throats being cut. What surprised me was that I have already read one of this author's books before, kill Shot, and it was superior to this. The only redeeming features was the fairly accurate description of San Francisco and Santa Cruz and the author's obvious love for bikes. I liked the background of the cover, but Bolan's pose was just bizarre. Give this one a miss.

I really want to give this story a 6.5. So much potential, but so much chucked away. The supporting characters really drew me in, both from the North Korean side as well as the FBI side. The plot wasn't too outlandish and did work as a Bolan story even though there were sections where Bolan was side-lined. However the story didn't fit into the allocated pages, much was chopped out and major characters were killed off page with a sentence in the story to explain their demise. I feel the author started the story full of hope then just ran out of space, or a merciless editor just removed huge chunks and left it at that. But what really rankled, more than Bolan being one dimensional, was the complete re-write of Jack Grimaldi. Here he comes across as a complete ass - a sexist, misogynistic character that has nothing to do with the Grimaldi of previous novels. I felt like punching him every time he opened his mouth. Grimaldi could have been replaced by any character for all the contribution he made to the story. The author got the character complete wrong and it showed. Hence the lower rating.

A straight forward tale involving a super weapon and the teams tracking down the villains. Able Team get sent to Hawaii where the get a bit of a run around before the climax at an airfield. Along the way they get to work with two interesting cops and exchange bullets with some colorful villains. North Korea is i.d. as the big bad early on and so Phoenix are sent to penetrate the country and destroy the pulse weapon. This part of the story was more disappointing as there was no mention of incursions in previous books and the Force didn't even mention being worried at the prospects of going into such a country. There were no twists or turns, it was a regular A to B story, but it wasn't too bad.

This must have been written by teenagers as it was just awful. Bolan is cardboard character who flies helicopters with one hand while pulling pins out of grenades with his teeth and firing rocket launchers inside the helicopter with the other hand. All the Brit characters spoke as if they were related to the queen. The Major was useless as a villain and a leader. And his men were there only to be cannon fodder. Oh, and everybody knew Mack Bolan's name but didn't have any idea what he had done in the past. Really poor. But what killed this for me was when Bolan recruited the native Indians and deliberately sacrificed them just so he could sneak into the Major's camp. Bolan would never throw away other people's lives they way the authors had him do in this book. Hence the low rating.

I finally took the plunge and bought one of these new fangled Mack Bolan ebooks. Too be honest, I did not enjoy the experience of reading on my iPad. The battery would run low, the Kindle app wouldn't tell me exactly what page I was on (loc 3555 of 4653 ? WTF?) and the weight of trying to read it was like holding a Game of Thrones hardback. The story was ok, it was a Mike Newton and was a basic A-B-C adventure. No rattling of cages or kidnapped girlfriend this time out. Bolan pursues clues of a sarin gas attack in LA - two days after it happened - and the name of the villain is laid out for us in the very beginning. The plot never really made sense, it was something to do with reunited both Korea's (which is why I chose this story as it seemed more topical at the moment) but I was never clear on why LA was used. I must have missed something somewhere. And I found Bolan's incursion into North Korea a bit too easy. but otherwise it was a fun adventure.

I enjoyed this far more than the Stony Man I recently reviewed. Christian fundamentalists in the US military (and veterans) are causing mass terrorist incidents in an attempt to cause martial law, then take control of the nuclear arsenal and wipe out the Middle East...except confusingly Israel will not be affected by all the fallout and will be able to rebuild the Temple of Solomon and then Jesus will show up again, smiling benevolently to all the white people whilst blowing any body else. Nobody ever said that fundamentalists were smart. Bolan comes into the show by accident then follows the clues to the Twin Cities where he demolishes various biker gangs with his usual Executioner efficiency. He is joined first by a reformed biker then by an Israeli agent who keeps her gun down the front of her knickers because nobody would ever look there?? This is the first Darwin Holmstrom that I have read, and yes it did feel choppy in some places, and sometimes it was repetitive when the bad guys were fantasying how orgasmic the 'Rapture' would be, but I still enjoyed it and the Stony Man characters were more true than in the afore mentioned Stony Man.

The good bit: I liked the character of Mani, despite his hallucinations. The bad bit: all the rest of it. Phoenix parachute into Ragheadistan (I kid you not, the author comes extremely close to naming his fictional country such) to do what exactly? All they do is get trapped in a house then leave the country, after describing the locals as backward and cowardly. Able trek across America looking for stolen backpack nukes that were stolen far too easily. Brognola chomps cigars, Kurtzman has all the answers and Price simpers. And don't get me started on the 'technobabble' nonsense on page 204, or the fact that Grimaldi pulls a Concorde out of his ass, one that is packed with missiles and assorted weapons !!!! and flies three quarters of the way around the world without refulling. It was a junk story where the author's right wing politics were unashamedly promoted and should never have been published.

Not too impressed with this story. The novel has dated badly and the dialogue is at times indecipherable. There were some good bits, however. Able Team being captured, the opening attack on the convoy, the sniper attack on the golf course. But the conversations between Bolan/Leo and Bolan/cop were awful.

I was a little disappointed with this story. One reason was because of the massive security breach - more on that later -but mainly because I expected the story to go to Bosnia and have something to do with the genuine massacres that happened there. Instead there was a generic runaround inside America and an never ending supply of cardboard cutouts for Bolan to shoot. I expected more from Mike Linaker but that was my error (not against Linaker because his story telling was ok, but the story itself.) So we have the character of Erica Dulkas who Bolan has to protect. She is a translator and seems to work for Stony Man Farm and as such seems to know the main players (apart from Bolan) and has the run of the place. Her pass isn't even checked when she leaves the grounds! What!?! This lady gets kidnapped on the first page! She could so easily spill the beans! So why have a translator working for Stony Man Farm when it would be far better to have her working at the DOJ and Stony Man personnel could use her from afar. This threw me out of the story right at the beginning and as such it took me nearly a week to plod my way through it. I couldn't get into this one which was unfortunate. Also the Apache helicopter on the cover isn't in the story at all. Couldn't the artist find another picture of a helicopter to copy and paste or was that asking too much?

Pick up, put down. Pick up, put down. I found myself putting this story down in the middle of an action scene and leaving it for a few days before forcing myself upon it again. It wasn't badly written, but I was uninterested in the linear storyline. It didn't go anywhere and the villains were too comical to make it interesting. Added to this was the author's obsession with describing the damage done to a human body by a bullet or a bomb and another obsession of describing guns down to their component atoms. All very dull. Personally I would give this one a miss.

This was utter garbage. Written by a 14 year old who has the vague idea of story line but has a long way to go, me thinks. It gets 2 stars simply because Able Team go abroad instead of being hamstrung to the USA but the story was so disjointed and the characters so cardboard it made awful reading. The Powell guy started off ok during his introduction, but after that degenerated into a 'jivin' teenager. The dialogue was incoherent. Able Team acted like prize morons instead of professionals and at one point Gadgets was even laughing as he threw phosphorous grenades at people and watched them burn! What garbage.

This is certainly the best Phil Elmore that I have read to date. No mention of 'righteous justice' here. The whole story takes place within 24 hours and most of that on top of a speeding train. Lots of action, pretty much non stop, and if I had a complaint it would be that it became a little tedious towards then end with the assault on the final safe house and the never ending supply of skinheads who were prepared to sacrifice themselves. Bolan is invincible in the book. Suffering from burn injuries he manages to fight his way through 300 pages with only being a little winded. Good story, interesting characters, and a bullet proof Bolan!

This is a borderline 7 star. Not badly written and with some interesting references to people back at Stony Man Farm. But the problem with it is that the book is two short stories placed together in a single cover and neither has any relation to the other. The first part involves tracking down a North Korean defector who has run off to join the party scene, part two deals with Bolan on vacation and dealing with Nuke of the Week in Yellowstone park. And that is the second problem. Okay, these terrorists want to end the world as we know it. But there is no reason given for wanting to do this. The characters are all cardboard cut-outs which was disappointing. So, okay written but not a wonderful book.

Oh, this was so good, probably the best that I have read of this series. The heat, the sand, the sun. Everything so vividly described it was almost like being there. A two week trek across the Sahara in pursuit of a murderous cult lead by a bloodthirsty American. The only disappointment with the story itself would be that there was no backstory to Blackwell and no explanation as to why Phoenix Forcer were in pursuit of him. Otherwise brilliant. One star deducted for the misleading cover and title. Although Aswan was the goal nobody got anywhere near it.

This is better than the previous Phil Elmore that I read, see Crucial Intercept. There was only one "righteous fury" this time around. The characters were a bit flimsy and the megalomania a little too generic. The school in question features in only a few chapters the rest of the story concerns the rescue of the prime ministers son. What held this story back for me was all the John Woo moments as Bolan walks through the chapters in slow motion, gun in each hand, blast away with 100% accuracy whilst everybody misses him with automatic fire. Not very convincing. But I loved the cover!

What a load of garbage and I totally disagree with previous reviewers. Where do I start with this nonsense? So, if I got this right, guys get laid off from work and blame automation and computers. Instead of looking for new jobs they get hold of guns and become terrorists massacring anybody and everybody. Sounds realistic, right? They are recruited by the most inept Japanese terrorists going, ones who shoot their unemployed recruits on a whim. They then fumble and bumble their way around and set themselves up as ducks in a shooting arcade. Great way to go out if you loose your job. And then there is Able Team and their whole host of guest stars and hangers on. The cast reads like a Hollywood movie end credits. Just over half of Phoenix Force show up to shoot the unemployed terrorists. And Harold Brognola climbs down ropes on the side of buildings. But what annoys me is how the guest characters kill without compunction. A gymnast (who is flown in from California to Atlanta in a matter of minutes) a regular cop, Toni Blancanales and a computer programmer become expert commando's and just go on to massacre the unemployed terrorists with no problem whatsoever. Just grab a machine gun or plant explosives and booby traps, these 4 can do it all. Completely unbelievable, as well as the fact that they seem to join the super secret Stony Man Farm organisation with out any problem. So complete junk. The only shining star is the return of Toni Blancanles, a character that is completely forgotten by modern Gold Eagle writers.

Panic in Philly...but there was very little of Philly in it. on the positive side this is how the Executioner should be, uncertain, unsure, questioning himself and his motivations, and not the impervious Gold Eagle super-soldier. Yes, it is an early novel but it clearly is a very different character to the later GE novels. But in Panic in Philly we only get to see two houses. The action takes place over the course of a single evening and Bolan moves from one Mafia safe house to the Capo's house and that is where the story remains. For much of the story it feels like a stage play and you can almost feel the directions as 'character enters' or 'character exits'. Which is a shame as I would like to have seen a little more of the city itself instead of generic houses. But Bolan carries off his first impersonation of a Black Ace, something that would continue in later books and turns the Mafia factions upon themselves, playing off their paranoia and fears. That was a good plot. And we can only imaging the horrors when Frank the Kid shows up in New York with the severed head of the wrong Bolan. The dialogue felt wrong in many places and I don't know if it is my lack of understanding of gangster language or that the dialogue has dated badly. It through me out a few times trying to decipher what the characters were on about. And Leo's weird sign language to the aging Don was...just weird.

Starts great, fizzles in the middle as the lack of villain's motive becomes apparent, then a rushed an unsatisfactory ending. I did like the references to previous missions (this story takes place immediately after Stony Man 119: Close Quarters)and there is reference to a Mack Bolan adventure featuring a 'carnivore' device but I have no idea which book that is. But after a great and sinister beginning involving kidnapped children, that plot piece faded away as did the drug smuggling and the story evolved into one of moving from location to location shooting terrorists which soon became tedious. Thus only a 7.

Pretty average novel. Bolan is up against a terrorist team of six instead of hordes of fanatics. The bad guys are left wing loonies who seem to think that killing people will somehow enlighten the masses. It was slow going sometimes, although I did like the fact that Bolan was somehow more human when faced with fewer opponents rather than a killing bullet proof automaton that he is sometimes portrayed as.

Before 1990 Mike Newton had written some original Bolan stories, but around this period he must have realised that writing cookie cutter novels was much easier. In Assault we have the beginnings of the cut and paste that would serve the writer well for the next twenty five years plus. No sniper scene shooting the telephone but the girl does get kidnapped and Bolan does rattle cages and climb the ladder. And it started out so promising as well, with Bolan going under cover. Unfortunately there was no tension in these scenes, and I must confess I lost track of which villain was which in this little drugs cabal. And there was so much padding that I suspect this is really only a regular Executioner expanded. All in all a very dull, repetitive and slow read.

And the best thing about this title was.... ....the title itself. The rest was just drek. Dreadfully written nonsense that took me a week to get through, I kept picking it up and putting it down again. The prose was wooden, Bolan was led around by the nose and the supporting cast were just so uninteresting. Bolan, it seems, has encountered most of the people in this story before, and apart from a cop who returns from Executioner 141, it seems that they all appeared in mystery, never published adventures. If the novel wasn't published then why mention these missions? Why? It makes no sense. A quick rewrite of certain sections could have removed it all. But I did manage to make it all the way through, so I suppose I should be pleased with that.

"Righteous fury", "Righteous god", "Righteous wraith"! And on it went. There was little story in this book, just action scenes repeated over and over and over. It got repetitive quickly. And dull. I would have liked to see more character development, but what we got was basically a reworking of Die Hard 4 with Bolan being as bullet proof as he wanders of into the smoke holding pistols in both hands, always hitting his targets and very little coming his way. I was not impressed.

My eyes! My eyes! I could not finish it and that does not happen often. It was dreadful. Poorly written as if a kid had a go. I got as far as McCarter making machine gun noises at passing cars then stopped. Do not read this rubbish whatever you do.

This is a bit better than the usual Mike Newton. Bolan is sent to Russia to extract a Russian agent who has information on various crime rings in Moscow and doesn't know who to trust due to corruption at the highest levels. Enter Mack Bolan. What follows is a pursuit along Stalin's Road of Bones (which the author constantly reminds us of). It is good but could have been better as the pursuers are the usual 2 dimensional hoodlums. When all is said and done I did have to wonder what good the Russian agents testimony would be now that all the gangsters are dead.

Hmm, what we have here as one review has already said, is the normal Mike Newton affair. Get a gang together, this time Able Team, get a list of targets and then split up and run around throwing handgrenades at the targets. Girl gets kidnapped so off to the rescue. Nothing original whatsoever and the author has done it so many times before. Dull. The second part was better when the gang get into the rain forest. But otherwise it was been there, seen it, done it so many times before that even Bolan must be bored of it by now.

The story itself if pretty basic. There is nothing too strenuous for either teams and the villains have a mundane plot to massacre Americans by taking guns to malls and opening fire. Which is fine because I don't mind not have a "destroy the world" or "nuke of the week" plot. But I have to agree with the reviews below. Somewhere the editing failed and lots of errors went uncorrected. Characters did morph into each other mid paragraph along with a host of other mistakes that pulled me out of the story. And yes, the villains were not very bright. I enjoyed the New Mexico scenes more than the action in Yemen.

A topical location and situation as Bolan is dropped into the Syrian war. Bolan is out to rescue the passengers of a downed UN plane, but the bad guys are also after the passengers as hostages. Unfortunately the Syrian situation plays very little in the story, we could have been in a generic civil war in a generic desert. Which is a shame because the author could have included a lot more, such as a perilous drive through the city of Homs as the military bomb it. Instead we have rehashed characters and situations that have appeared in other works by this author. So it was really a wasted opportunity for a good and original story.

A hard to review story due to several flaws. On one hand it is extremely topical and up to date. Boko Harum are running rampant in Nigeria and it was good to see Bolan going up against them and taking them down. The siege at the bakery lasted some 200 pages and did make for tense reading. On the other hand, the timings did not match up. In the prologue and chapter one we are led to believe that Bolan is sent in to rescue an American bishop who was caught up in an attack on a church and escapes. Bolan flies from Washington DC to Argentina and on to Nigeria, although he has no idea why until Brognola debriefs him as the plane is coming in to land. It would take at least 18 hours to fly that distance, yet when Bolan lands the attack on the church has only just taken place, the bishop is wandering around dazed somewhere and the entire story takes place in the space of six hours or so. So why was Bolan already in the air? The attack at the bakery takes up the majority of the story, yet it is extremely vague as to how big this place is. It is massive, full of blind corners and tunnels, yet the Christian fugitives have only been in there for 3 days. Bolan fights off wave after wave of Boko Harum killers but the action is confusing as it is hard to visualise where Bolan is. I did get a little fed up with the author banging on about 'Innocent Christians' every other page. I am sure there are "Innocent Muslims" in Nigeria who also despair at the actions of Boko Harum as well. So it was a good story, but could have had a little more colour, maybe something about the temperature of Africa or something, and the timeline was confusing.

I don't usually post reviews but this book was such a disappointment. The story is divided into two segments. First the Able Team adventure followed by Phoenix Force. The Able Team was good fun. Straight forward, no surprises. Carl Lyons felt a little too aggressive towards his friends, and the undercover guy who was helping them was underdeveloped but otherwise it was a normal adventure for the three guys. But then comes the dreadful rest of the book. The picture on the front cover doesn't happen. If it did then it must have been half a paragraph and I missed it. The blurb under the picture doesn't happen. The back cover mentions the ambassador to Guatemala, but in fact it was the ambassador to Nigeria, a completely different continent. Phoenix Force go head to head with terrorists in Iraq.....in fact they went into Iran. So the complete cover is totally inaccurate. The Phoenix Force adventure was a real mess. The opening of chapter 27 is a good example. McCarter would be talking to Manning who suddenly became Hawkins who morphed back into Manning again - in one paragraph. Then we would have Manning say something only to have McCarter on the following page claim he said it. I lost track of the characters and where they were meant to be or doing. Grimaldi suddenly joins them in Iran/Iraq/Guatemala/Nigeria or where ever and he is now a master sniper! The characters would hop effortlessly from one country to the next without explanation. And McCarter and Hawkins are suddenly guarding the US ambassador in Iraq, why I don't know. There was also a Mossad character introduced in the early stages of part two, a guy based in Argentina. He went out looking for revenge and then nothing. He was gone. Forgotten about. Disappointing nonsense that was badly edited with a misleading cover. Won't read this again.