Death Minus Zero

OMG! Where to start with this? It was tedious. It was replete with continuity errors. The 'tech' was just guff. Phoenix and Able are barely in it. It is repetitious. There were characters who contributed nothing. Seriously, I was bored reading it. There was no tension whatsoever. I kept looking at it the book when I wasn't even half way, thinking that I just did not want to go on. But I stuck with it, hoping it would get better. It didn't. There were errors like McCarter kills a Chinese guard towards the end of the novel, and takes the dead guy's "subgun". Then, a few pages later, he kills a guard, takes the dead guy's "subgun", and informs Rafael that he has just encountered his first guard. In the same sequence, Hawkins has a Beretta that becomes a Glock, that becomes a Beretta. And so it went on. There was an Apache character who, I have no idea why he was involved other than he was in Zero Option (which I read a long time ago and never reviewed). He is such a whizz that he has the latest "Apple phone with ALL THE APPS INSTALLED". Yes, all of them. Wow, what a techie. Able has two minor gunfights, Phoenix has one. In between there is so much repetition about how marvelous Saul Kaplan is and how wonderful Doug on the space platform is. Pages and pages of the characters all thinking the same thing. The Chinese characters were no better. Constantly thinking the same thing over and over again. Uggh. After reading this, with its errors and dullness I wonder why I bother reading these books at all. And to think I paid for this back in the day. The was the penultimate book in the series, before Able and Phoenix were retired for good, and it is clearly understandable why.

A continuation of the Zero storyline where the Chinese take another crack at the orbiting platform by kidnapping its creator. Able is stateside and has to protect the ground-based Zero base from attack, and Phoenix has to endure the brutal snow overseas to try and rescue Kaplan. Just slightly above average. Action scenes were not as plentiful as other books, and a little too much time spent with the villain characters. Even the finale was just average. Still reasonably entertaining overall, just not on par with other SM novels by this author.