Fire Hammer

Pretty good read this one. Nothing that stands out to grab you but overall it is quite good to read. The action scenes probably hold the book together as they are very well done but it doesn't seem to grab like one of the classics.

In this book, Mack Bolan is out to stop a radical group of Asian terrorists who want to topple communism in China. Initially this doesn't sound like a bad thing, not until you find out they plan to blow up a number of reactors to achieve this goal. Bolan catches wind of this trying to rescue one of the men involved and soon finds himself facing the entire sepratist army. The book is quite good and doesn't cast Mack as the "super soldier" he normally appears as, he takes his lumps and has to rely on his associates more than once. It also shows the victims of his war a number of times, in the guise of a young boy that helps Bolan and as a Chinese operative that's tortured and killed as he's being used to lure Bolan out. There are some great scenes involving massive shipments of explosives as well, particularly when Mack detonates one aboard a flatbed truck that's desperately trying to flee the scene. While Fire Hammer isn't one of the best Executioner books around, it is a solid read and worth the time of any fan.

A couple leaders of an anti-PRC group are planning to ruin nuclear reactors in China. Bolan's mission is to track them down. A sidekick from the CIA, a woman named Jiahua, was with him for much of the adventure. I agree with Terry's review on this one, this book is an example of what can go wrong if a book is centered too much on just the action. While the book starts off with the action fast and furious, and continues throughout the novel, there were a number of areas in the story where the action or situations didn't seem plausible, or were repetitive, or just plain dry. But the biggest problem I had with the novel was the character of Mack Bolan... or rather the lack of it. Much of the time he was nothing more than an automaton, a generic action figure, where you could easily insert "Joe Smith: Superagent Commando", in place of Bolan. No showing of emotions, a good example is when he discovered on the road to the town the boy, Kin, who had helped them earlier, had been tortured and killed and the weeping mother bringing him back to town. Bolan had as much reaction to this scene as if he were walking past a fencepost. And much of the dialogue in the novel was as wooden as the fencepost. Pure action novel readers will like it, many good scenes, and the battle at the compound in and near the reactor replica were decent, but if you are looking for an entry in the series that is more of an actual Mack Bolan, than this book will not be satisfactory.

Cool, just totally cool!!( :

This was cool. Bolan has to track the terrorists through malasia and stop them from blowing up a chinese nuclear power plant. what a awsome idea. exellent story line and plenty of action.

This seemed to be just a plain Bolan adventure.

While this book was wall-to-wall action, I thought it didn't have enough room for the characters to breathe. Bolan seemed to have little personality and the other characters in the story seemed kind of lifeless.