Continental Contract

So, not a bad entry so far, just not a great entry. Mack has to hop a flight to Paris, almost by accident if simply to get away from some mafai hoods gunning for him. He meets a guy on the plane who by sheer coincidence looks so much like him, hoods in Paris mistake the guy for Mack, so Mack has to rescue him. Of course, Mack hooks up with a French girl who helps him with his war on the mob. Not a lot of action sequences tho, and there's a nice call back to hi "Nam days, as a figure from Nam makes an appearance. The ending was a little abrupt for my liking. But, it was kind of cool to see Mack take his war outside of the continental US.

Kind of a James Bond vibe to this one as Bolan goes international with an unexpected visit to Paris and the French Riviera, including the casino in Monte Carlo. All this doesn't lend itself well to the established Executioner premise and there are a few times that Bolan acts out of character, some credibility straining coincidences, and more than a few plot holes. I still found it to be an entertaining read although it doesn't quite match up to the previous entries in the series.

I really don't know what to think of this book. I think Mack made to many mistakes. Especially letting Rudolfi live that first time. Mack should have taken him out early. It seemed though that Mack at the End might have learned a lesson,I hope so. The Cici character annoyed me. I had a hard time trying to figure out what the hell she was saying. And mack having her get him a rifle was strange to me. And sighting in the rifle at chateau, I guess Mack wasnt worried about attracting attention to himself. I give this book 7 stars for the Wilson Brown character. I liked the exchange between him and Mack in the casino. And Wilson's decision to help Mack. Hopefully Assault on Soho will be better.

The Executioner’s war continues as he’s hunted at an airport, forcing him on to a plane to France. On the plane he finds himself seated close to a celebrity who matches Bolan’s description. After they land the mob is waiting and they grab the doppelganger, sending Bolan on a rescue mission. Meanwhile, somebody who served in Vietnam with Bolan is looking to collect on the $100,000 on his head. I wasn’t looking forward to getting to this one as I read through all of Pendleton’s work. The 6th book was my least favourite of the series and the reviews here were rather middling. And while you can’t judge a book by its cover, the cover of this book is rather flat and unappealing. And so with my expectations suitably lowered I ended up thinking this was a decent enough book. By this point we had seen Bolan ally himself with Vietnam vets but it was a good twist to see a vet turn on him. At the centre of the book there is a very good action scene that ends with Bolan branding a mobster with a hot gun barrel. While you start to take it for granted after a while, Pendleton always does a good job of efficiently telling a good story in a short space. On the negative side, there were a lot of little things that bugged me. Pendleton’s writing of a French accent was rather grating to me. Once again he makes the annoying error of putting a silencer on a revolver. The coincidence of randomly meeting Bolan’s double is a bit too much. It all seems a little too easy to me that Bolan is able to go to a foreign country with a language barrier on a whim and is able to easily arm himself. While this is the worst Executioner book published up until this point I would probably rank it a half notch higher than the next one in the series. I would say that this is your average Executioner book and worth reading if you’re going through all of Pendleton’s books, but I wouldn’t hunt it down otherwise. Executioner Kill Count: 33

Investigating an air freight hijack operation at Dulles International Airport the Big Guy realises he has been suckered big time and this is likely the end surrounded on all sides with no avenue of escape. In a desperate last ditch play he manages to escape the cordon and flees to the only means of escape an International airliner about to depart to Paris. Using the passport thrust upon him by Brognola in his attempt to recruit the Big Guy (not sure how his new looks were photographed but anyway) he successfully manages to escape upon the plane and off to Paris. Probably the thing I liked the most about this title is the wonderful characters introduced and there a heap of them and a further reminder of the character of the man where he could so often take the easy way out to protect himself but over and over again will put himself in harms way to protect the innocent. Not a ten like the first four titles in this series but hey a very solid read which you will enjoy if you read this one. Recommended reading.

It gets a 5 because the characters in the book isn't as fully developed as earlier works. Plus, the setting is in southern France and it doesn't seem real. I have to wonder why did Don Pendleton felt the need to bring him outside of US. It does have merits for good action scenes and put in an ultimatum on the Mafia there. The only thing that bothers me a lot is that Bolan didn't kill Rudolfi the first time he ran into him... If I had to guess, Don was having a writer's block on this one. Pass this one if you must, I read it due to being number 5 in the series. :)

This was a good book and entertaining from the standpoint that Pendleton took Bolan international. The scene early on is believable, and the author did a good job of building a scenario taking our Hero to France. However, there is nothing special about this book. Compared to the first four, I'd say this is somewhat disappointing. If I had been waiting for this "new release" back in 1971, I would have been extremely disappointing. The first four Executioners were in one word -- phenomenal. This book seemed a little rushed as it never really developed the deep characters of the first four books, and there isn't a real insight into Bolan's mind -- also a trademark in the first four. There were also some confusing, almost unusual parts. The mobs distant connection from Miami to France, the "Gil Martin" character who was a movie star and seemed to look like Bolan -- but no one ever mistook Bolan for him prior (??). The massive purging of mob leaders at the end also seemed uneventful and not very believable. As did the reason that Bolan put out his heroic hit. For the Bolan Fan, it's a nice read, but it isn't the great story we commonly enjoy in the early books.

This was flat out dull and just plain average at best. It seems Bolan lack this honned cold harded skils of wiping out his mortal enemy and leaving the Frence king pin alive was a very strange display of weakness and so out of character for Bolan that the book was more of a drama one than suspencefull one. Bolan´s way of working around the personality of the lookalike actor was a good one and the final chapter was the only highlight of the other wise boring book. In the end.....most likly one of the most lame Mafia war books I have read so far and actually this is the second worst one so far which is not a good thing but still most likely the next one will be a much better one. It can´t get much worse than this.....(Iceland – 2010)

I gotta agree with Monsta Mack on this one, while it was a good read and flowed well in the series, it just wasn't all that. Mack was to trusting and introspective here and lacked that cold lightining strike style that made the first four books great. It picked up it's pace twards the end, but it felt like an afterthought by that point. Combine that with the fact he's in France and you got one average executioner story!

I must say I greatly enjoyed this book when I first read it about two years ago. It was infact the first book I had ever read of the Mack Bolan series and after having read it I was hooked! Ever since Mack Bolan has been probably my favorite literary character ever. I loved the plot of this one and the one after it and have yet read a Mack Bolan book that I didn't enjoy!

This is another early book which I very much enjoyed reading. Bolan's situation seemed particularly dire; lots of close calls, setups, etc. The highlight of the book has to be Bolan's ultimatum to the mob, near the end of the book. The character development in this book was very good; espcially Cici Carceaux. (Although her connection to the story seemed just a little shaky.) I took one star off my rating of this book because it seemed a little unlikely that Bolan didn't drill Rudolfi until the very end of the book, even though the guy had tried to kill him twice.

Damn good reading.The sarge goes global and does a bang-up job of it.Wils Brown made a good blast from Bolan's past to go with the story.

A decent book, worth reading, but a long way down from the awesome first 4 books. Average Pendleton stuff.

It took me until 2001 (at age 26) to discover this rich world of fiction. I am glad to join the ranks of all you Bolanites. I couldn't resist getting sucked in to Bolan's world through Pendleton's amazing snare of words. I found this old beat-up soft cover next to the trash late one night while on call at the veteran's hospital. Bored and insomnolent I flirted with chapter one like I was skipping across quicksand. You Bolanites might be better critics of this book because you are familiar with the territory. But c'mon, pretend you're me for one second, this was my first Executioner read. I was blown away! I like having read this one first, even without the thorough knowledge of the earlier works, I still feel like I got a good image of who Bolan is. That is to say, I thought it was so weird that he let the same guy (Rudolfi)live twice, only to unzip him in the end. In other ways too, Bolan's soul and humanness comes through in this book, as does his struggle with his inevitable fate with life on the run. So much for Eden and tasting the French Riviera's finest fruit. Bolan still gets his kicks! What a bad-ass, what a pimp, what an international untouchable force! I already know I'll be loyal to the original roots, Pendleton's first 38 Executioner novels that is. It is exciting to know that I have not even begun to know how deep this series gets. I gave it an eight, because I need room at the top, but my first instinct was a ten!!!!

This book was a bit below average for a Bolan / Pendleton book but hey they cant always be perfect. I enjoyed reading about Bolans fiest battles against the Mafia over seas, but I was let down when bolan let the bad guy walk away, only to have him shoot out the windows and wound Cici. Big let down, Bolan should have zipped him from crotch to neck and back again before he had a chance to take Bolan and Cici out.

Another early Don Pendleton opus. To really enjoy thes, you have to think back 30 years, and try to see the world without cellphones and the internet. Bolan gets into a jam at Dulles and has to escape via a jetliner to France. The novel reads like a series of 3 or 4 vignettes, each having Bolan face another, different problem. There was not a cohesiveness to the plot. Nevertheless, it is an entertaing read. Pendleton knows adventure fiction, and he writes a great tale. Bolan seems much more human and concerned with his own mortality in these early books than in the more current ones. However, he does not over philosophize his actions either. This blend makes for a good read. Last 20 or 30 pages are the best of the book, and very worthwhile reading.

Although I enjoyed this book and thought the action was great, for some reason I didn't like it as much as Miami Massacre, the previous book. There are some highpoints in the action: at the airport in chapter 1 and during Bolan's raid on the house of joy. A couple interesting characters appear, including a mysterious lady who remains mysterious to the end. Maybe this one was less interesting to me because the police chasing after Bolan in this one never really had any part of the story. Nothing was seen from their point of view and they just seemed to be convenient obstacles rather than motivated characters in their own right as they were in the 4 previous books. Bolan does a bit of soul searching here and even shows a little weakness (which costs him.) He learns a lesson and teaches the French mob some lessons in return. This one gets only 6 stars from me. Nothing is really wrong with this book. It just didn't give the same excitement as Miami Massacre or Battle Mask.

This one is a bit of a letdown after the thrill-a-minute pace of the first 4. It doesn't really get going until Mack starts offing Mafia biggies in order to free the hostages. But hey, it's still better than 95% of the action series garbage out there.

Hmm... actually, i thought this book was pretty good. It was fun to see Mack in a foreign country, doing his thing. It was an improvement over Miami Massacre in my opinion.

Not great as far as I'm concerned, but decent.

Could have been better, but it was alright.

Not as good as its predecessors, but it is quite interesting. The first novel set in a foreign land, the twists and turns could be somewhat confusing. If I had a choice, I would recommend that readers read from the beginning of the series to gain a background before reading this novel.