Eye Of The Storm

The first book in the “Black Eagle Force” series by Ken Farmer and Buck Steinke, Eye Of The Storm is a delightfully cheesy exercise in Mack Maloney-style military melodrama.

Starting a Super Secret Task Force With Super Tech and Super Planes, the men, women, and high-tech aircraft of Black Eagle Force battle a Mexican billionaire whose last name is an obscenity in Spanish (uh…) and who has a private island with a pyramid-lair and a gigantic arsenal of soldiers and military equipment (ok…).

I was impressed. Oh, it’s not the best ever. Even beyond its cheesiness, cliche-ness, and dubious character names, it’s about a hundred pages too long. But its downsides are thankfully much fewer than its upsides. I just really like Mack Maloney-esque “over the top but not really science fiction” military action, and when the action happens, it happens well.

The nature of the story means any “errors” or “contrivances” are easily forgiven. The BEF gets opponents of an appropriately challenging nature-no small feat. It has just the right amount of threat and “look at ’em go.” This is an excellent “popcorn book” and one I was overjoyed to uncover.