Slayground

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.

Wow, there're so few reviews for books after #410. Is the guy on the cover so off-putting that customers are driven away just from seeing him? Anyway... I'm not really sure how to review Slayground (that pun is bad and you should feel bad, Andy), since I didn't like it nor hate it. How was the action? It's OK. The plot? It's OK. The bad guys? The damsel in distress? The head of the Griffintown newspaper? They're all okay. The book's just okay. Nothing special. Admittedly I had high hopes for this one after reading Silent Threat; both novels feature cults and Bolan doesn't go up against those very often. But while Iron Thunder were a very real and not-really-silent threat, the one here is just... boring as shit, to be honest. But considering the senator's daughter won't fork over any government secrets - it's kinda hard for her to do so when she doesn't know or have any - they wind up sitting around with their thumbs up their asses. None of the villains are killed by Bolan or in an interesting way, although this is more a search-and-rescue mission than a search-and-destroy one. There are a couple cool scenes here, however. The cultists getting high from licking frogs was something different, as were Bolan's war hallucinations after being poisoned from one of the compound's traps. The appearance of Able Team at the end was also a nice touch. All those things give it an above average rating, although Silent Threat is a better cult story than this one.