Author: coilerxii

Review: Balkan Mercenary

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Balkan Mercenary

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Although not the latest Casca book, Balkan Mercenary is the most recent chronologically, occurring in the beginning of the Yugoslav Wars. It’s the first book in the series I’ve reviewed that’s written by Tony Roberts, who’s the current official author of the Casca franchise.

So, I have get this out of the way first. If this had no connection to Casca at all and was just the story of a man and his team of mercs going into the Yugoslav Wars to take down a war criminal and avenge the death of his loved one, it would be a modestly decent “51% book”. There are far better books than something in the same league as Marine Force One, but there also worse ones (which is why, in spite of my complaints, I still read the Casca books).

But this is the 44th installment in a long series that I think just doesn’t work as well in more modern times as it does in the distant past. It’s even mentioned in the book itself that Casca’s aliases are getting easier to track, so I can understand why Roberts seems keener to keep Casca a historical character.

Here, every reminder that this middling action-adventure tale featured a millennia-old immortal felt blatantly shoved in. A piece on how he remembered medieval Serbia. A piece on his blood being poisonous (this was present in the early books). And a tie-in with designated recurring enemies the Brotherhood of the Lamb, who feel especially forced. Balkan Mercenary, like many other Cascas, just plods to the middle, not daring to  try and take the extraordinary premise any farther than 51% of the way.

 

Review: Kill Or Capture

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Kill Or Capture

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Understandably pushed back because of the Maelstorm Rising series, Peter Nealen’s Brannigan’s Blackhearts continues with the just-released Kill Or Capture. It was well worth the wait.

Everything in this book reminded me of how great a cheap thriller this series is. Not just because the actual action is well-done (it certainly is) but because of all the touches that help it become more than the sum of its parts. There’s the opening where the protagonists are called back from their normal, everyday lives and families-something that distinguishes them from the Gold Eagle action automatons. There’s the super-conspiracy being both capable enough to pose a challenge worthy of a super-conspiracy and human enough to be fallible.

Of course, the actual plot is just a set-up for much action. I can sum it up in one sentence: The protagonists storm a fortified villa in northern Argentina. But the action is continuous, well-written, and solidly executed. The mountain terrain feels vivid and effective. The threats are varied. This is an excellent cheap thriller and worthy continuation of one of my favorite series.

Review: Lone Wolf-Night Raider

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Lone Wolf: Night Raider

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The book Night Raider is the first entry in the Lone Wolf series of “shoot the mobster” vigilante novels, written by famed sci-fi author Barry Malzberg under the pen name “Mike Barry”. The novels have the reputation of being…. something. I’ll put it that way. And that reputation is deserved.

What Malzberg himself admitted in an interview and essays was both that: A: The Lone Wolves were churned out quickly for the money to ride the “shoot the mobster” bandwagon and B: When he read an Executioner book prior to writing the Lone Wolf, he didn’t like it. You might think this had a negative effect on the series, and you would be right.

The book itself is the most generic 70s vigilante “be wronged, shoot the mobster” plot. I could guess everything if I’d only read War Against The Mafia. I could probably even guess everything just from secondhanded knowledge of the genre. The biggest, and arguably only divergence is how much of a lunatic the main character is (which is very much intended).

But it’s executed (no pun intended) in this almost avant-garde blocky stream-of-conciousness infodump style that joins Mike Lunnon-Wood’s lush “just keep going and talk it out, describe it out, but calmly” and Bob Forrest-Webb’s “I never met an exclamation point I didn’t like!” prose in the “weird style for a cheap thriller” club.

In many ways, the thoughts and controversies surrounding this series are better and more interesting than the books themselves. Night Raider itself, thanks to its origins, just has all the all the weaknesses of both artistic and commercial fiction. It has few of the strengths of either.

 

Review: Cold Allies

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Cold Allies

coldalliescover

Patricia Anthony’s debut novel Cold Allies is a distinctive book. But it is not exactly distinctive in a good way.

First, there’s two awkward plots. One plot is the surrealist tale of blue alien orbs that suck people in. The second plot is a sort of “World War III” where an “Arab National Army”, fleeing the drought and famine of an ecologically devastated world, invades Europe. There are (even by technothriller standards) a ton of shallow viewpoint characters who are constantly being shuffled around, taking out what little coherence might have existed.

The war plot is one of those weird cases where one might think the biggest issue would be the book being too political. And yes, a lot of the characters are shallow stereotypes, seemingly contributing to it. But it’s handled just totally matter-of-factly, kind of like Dark Rose or Ian Slater’s USA VS Militia series. For the alien plot, it crosses the line from “surreal” to “pretentious” pretty handily. This book is little but a bizarre novelty.

 

Review: Gray Matter Splatter

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Gray Matter Splatter

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The path to opening Gray Matter Splatter was a little offbeat. I thought Jack Murphy’s debut in the Deckard series, Reflexive Fire, was wildly uneven, the kind of book that’s “Mean 51%” instead of the consistently middling “Mode 51%”. I also, similar to my experience with spacesuit commandos last winter, was getting a little worn on middling action books after reading so many of them.

So I figured, having heard that this was the craziest out of the four Deckard books, that this book with a great title was worth a shot to leap out. And so I leapfrogged over the other two and headed straight for the fourth. It was a good decision.

Now this book still has many of the problems that plagued Reflexive Fire-the political soapboxing that got in the way of the plot, the not-unusual but still irritating long descriptions of weapons, the jumpy perspectives, and the less-than-developed characters. But it’s improved to a considerable degree with the fundamentals, and the mega-conspiracy behind everything is at least tamer than the mega-conspiracy in Reflexive Fire. So there’s a little less dissonance there.

But in terms of what matters, the action is excellent and challenging as Deckard and his mercs fight their way across the entire Arctic Circle. While the sustained action may be a little more implausible than the low-level action in Reflexive Fire, I’m certainly not complaining in that sense.

This is still a cheap thriller for all its pretensions. But it’s a good cheap thriller.

Review: Dead Simple

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Dead Simple

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The ninth book in the Blaine McCracken series, Dead Simple marked a point where it took a very long hiatus afterward.

It’s easy to see why. This book devolves into “Captain Beefheart Playing Normal Music” in a way that no previous Blaine McCracken book did. McCracken is, in the early parts, treated as aging and vulnerable-a problem both in terms of thematic dissonance and how he’s back to his old self instantly when the climax happens. The moments of whimsy and craziness that make the series so amusing feel half-hearted at best. The storyline is closer to a mundane “shoot the terrorist” than any previous McCracken, the MacGuffin is the least interesting and most bland in the series to date, and its historical-treasure subplot felt awkward and out of place, like it was trying too hard to follow the exact path of a Clive Cussler novel.

If this was in isolation with a new hero named, I dunno, Bruce McDowell, I’d have considered it a decent, slightly eccentric, run-of-the-mill “51% thriller”. But in comparison to its gonzo predecessors, it can’t help but fall short. Leaving the series buried for over a decade before a fortunate revival might have been for the best if the alternative was to stagger on into mundanity, losing everything that made Blaine McCracken fun and distinctive to begin with.

Review: Diamondhead

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Diamondhead

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Patrick Robinson’s Diamondhead is in some ways the perfect book for this blog. Robinson was one of the few authors to get going as a new technothriller writer after 1991, when the genre was imploding. Robinson also has a reputation for being well, not very good. After reading Diamondhead, I can say that, at least judged from that book, that reputation is accurate.

But there’s more to it. This isn’t just a clunkfest like say, a later Tom Clancy or “Tom Clancy’s” novel. It was strangely fascinating in how so many elements of the “cheap thriller” had, by the year 2009, just sort of mushed together.

The military details are ridiculously inaccurate, from SEALS riding into battle inside tanks (yes, along with the regular crew) to Sidewinders being used as air-to-ground missiles. Where this is particularly bad is the MacGuffin of the book, the titular missiles. They’re a new, formally banned as too cruel (wha?) type of anti-tank missile that burns the crew of any vehicle it penetrates-you know, like any other ATGM with a shaped charge that shoots something very hot into something with a lot of fuel and ammunition inside it.

But even beyond that, the genre kind of comes full circle back to the vigilante style as SEAL Mack Bedford (those are two truck brands) gets excoriated by the EVIL MEDIA, subject to a court martial that reminded me, no joke, of Phoenix Wright with all the loud “OBJECTIONS!”, before he gets his revenge on the evil French businessman/politician who’s been providing these super-missiles to rogue Islamist groups-and personally aiding in the first deployment of them. 

This plot could very well have worked as one of the classic “Men’s Adventure” thrillers. But unlike those, it suffers from the two things that plagued the technothriller-bloat and self-seriousness. At least with one of those books, you tended to get a brisk, smooth, “when in doubt, fight it out” style. This plods and clunks through unsuspenseful “suspense”, and then Mr. Truck just turns into John Rourke when the time comes for him to actually fight anyway. It has cheap thriller implausibility but not cheap thriller whimsy or bombast.

And the sad part is that more and more of the big-name, big-published “mainstream” thrillers (the kind I could find in the small book section of a local grocery store) are like this. There’s a reason why I review very few “big-time big-name” authors. Part of it is expense and part of it is me wanting to highlight obscure authors who need all the recognition they can get. But to be honest, a big part is that most of these thrillers are like Diamondheads in the ways that count.

Review: The Bear’s Claws

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The Bear’s Claws

(Full disclosure: I was a beta reader for this book and thus received an advance review copy)

Reading The Bear’s Claws was a pleasant surprise, the likes of which I hadn’t gotten from a WWIII book since Team Yankee. This tells the story of a Soviet mechanized infantry unit as it progresses through a World War III in 1982.

Now I could mention the book’s shortcomings-in particular, its character arcs are not exactly the most unpredictable. But given the small of World War III fiction in general, having a book with all the things it did right was delightful to experience.

  • The Soviets not only win, but win handily. This does make sense for 1982, but it’s still good to see that leap being taken in popular WWIII fiction. And to add to that, it’s not portrayed as a cakewalk for the people on the ground.
  • In great contrast to the stereotypical Red Storm Rising-style type of book where viewpoint characters hop around, the “camera” here stays tightly focused.
  • Finally, it has the kind of “plotnukes” that I would normally denounce. Yet they were handled in a way that didn’t have me going “oh, come on!”. The plotnukes featured a personal connection and just the right amount of explanation.

This sort of thing doesn’t come along often. So I’m very happy to give The Bear’s Claws my thumbs up.

Review: A Talent For Revenge

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A Talent For Revenge

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I think I may have found it. The apex. The apogee. The peak. The high point, the distillation of everything that “men’s adventure” fiction contained, all packed into A Talent For Revenge, the premier book in the “Specialist” series by “John Cutter” (a pen name of John Shirley).

The book stars supermerc Jack Sullivan as he’s hired by an heiress to kill an exiled African dictator. (Yes, the plot can be summed up in one sentence. This is men’s adventure). The men’s adventure-ness of this can be summed up by how the book blends more or less every single trend that these throwaway pulps put together.

  • 70s men’s adventure was notorious for sexual sleaze. Guess what this book has lots of?
  • 80s men’s adventure was notorious for ridiculously long descriptions of weapons. Guess what this book has lots of?
  • 70s men’s adventure frequently let its heroes get banged up. This happens to Sullivan, but….
  • 80s men’s adventure frequently turned its heroes into unstoppable fleshy Terminators. Sullivan also definitely qualifies as one.
  • Then there’s the constants, like a ridiculous amount of gore and a total lack of tastefulness.

By the late 80s, the genre had (with the obvious exceptions) begun to harden around the “80s, no sex, lots and lots of gun descriptions” style. The 90s commercially devastated it to such a degree that technothrillers looked untouched in comparison. When I came of age, “men’s adventure” in its purest form was down to cheap-looking Gold Eagles with awkward covers.

So I have a strange appreciation for this spectacle. If I had to show someone one book that would sum up “men’s adventure”, it would be this one.