Sesmic Surge

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.

A fun to read Stony Man as AuthorDoug gets us back to some of the basic know-how of our warriors. Every SM will have its quick intro for each character for anyone just picking up a book so we all know Manning is an explosives expert. In Seismic Surge we get to see a lot of that demolitions background come to life for a change both creating explosives and preventing explosions and further understand just how smart Manning really is. The other enjoyable feature of this book is that both Phoenix and Able members get to go solo and show us some individual true grit. Encizo takes a beating role playing as one of the tourists; T.J. offers to help out the locals fix their old broken down weapons only to have to phone home for Cowboy to tell him how to do it and best of all we get to see Gadgets in his own multi-tasking berserker mode. McCarter, well, we all love his style especially when he uses a dead guy for a blast shield. And for me one of the best features of a SM is the banter between team members and no one does that better than AuthorDoug! Oh and thanks for slipping the Big Guy in!