Call to Arms

There exists an extremely rare brain disease called fatal insomnia in which a person loses the ability to sleep, ultimately resulting in death between a few months and a few years. If you liquefied the previous book and this one and injected it into the human brain, you might just very well have a cure of this horrifying disease. Call to Arms is just Hour of Conflict 2: Electric Boogaloo but with slightly, ever so slightly, more plot. It's revealed here that Stone is working with a Hezbollah chieftain named Afif Rahman and they want to stage a bunch of terrorist attacks and raids on American soil with right-wing groups as scapegoats to make people lose faith in the American government or something. Why Rahman and Stone need each other for this I don't know, and don't really care either. Even then, it's all rather vague as to what they hope to accomplish by doing this, and the page numbers were much more interesting overall. Did you know that page 158 comes after 157, and is followed by 159? Isn't that crazy? So we start off with Bolan in the Evergaldes in pursuit of Stone, getting into a series of battles with guys in airboats. Bullets fly and stuff blows up. Then he takes on some far-right militia groups playing wargames somewhere and kills them, too, then it's back to the Everglades for more shootouts and explosions. Just an aside: there's a much better Executioner book written by this author that took place in the Everglades, called Paramilitary Plot. You should check it out instead of reading this tripe. Then it turns out Stone and Rahman have escaped to the Seychelles, where the second half of the book takes place, and we get the obligatory sniper scene and cage rattling, then the bad guys bite the dust with insultingly underwhelming sendoffs and you wonder just how any of this crap warrants a total of 180,000 words across three books. Newton does this infuriating thing where he introduces characters, gives them entire backstories and gets into their heads just so he can kill them off pages later. He did this because he didn't feel like developing this raiding party idea from the previous paragraph, probably because he wasn't getting paid enough to give a fuck, so he fills the pages with navel gazing before hopping into the head of some other character and repeating the process. And since he clearly didn't give a fuck, you won't either. Then you're on the final page, page 220, and it's finally, mercifully over. Skip Hour of Conflict and Call to Arms. Just read Patriot Gambit instead and tell yourself that Stone died in that one and the lady fed got away somehow.

This is a surprise to me, as from reviews and from my experience with Newton’s trilogies before, I wasn’t expecting much from this conclusion to the American trilogy. This book is far superior to Ride the Beast, and light years better than the dreadful Message To Medellin in comparison. Bolan is still on the trail of Stone, and his mission for this book starts in the everglades of Florida. We are left off assuming that Bolan found reason to find Stone here, from the list of possible locations Bolan acquires at the end of book two. Info on how Bolan narrowed this down would have been helpful, but whatever, the everglades it is and off we go. A good sequence of battles in the everglades, some nostalgia from Paramilitary Plot here, and the action shifts to the other side of the world. The elusive Stone has found temporary sanctuary in the Seychelles now, and the rest of Bolan’s action takes place on this Island nation. Here is where the book really shines in my opinion. While not as centered on action as in the everglades sequence, I found the storytelling to be some of Newton’s better writing in some time for the rest of this novel. Gone is the endless pages of cerebral thoughts from every character that plagues too many of the writer’s books and bogs down the pace and momentum of the story. Here Newton sticks more to the interaction of a cast of characters in a complex storyline that involves several new characters and factions with their various agendas, and the story is weaved together to bring all this to the final conclusion of the trilogy. I enjoyed the whole setting, characters and events of this section of the book, and was left pleased with how this trilogy turned out. It was not perfect by any means, but I won’t bother nitpicking on small details. Sure Newton includes a cut-and-paste sniper scene here, but other than that I found most of this book to be rather original. I would rather have seen a better epilogue, maybe have Bolan finish off the original villain he ran over from book one, but he just has Brognola tell him that Pike didn’t make it. But oh well, good trilogy here, I recommend it.

Copy and paste. What a wonderful thing computers allow us to do this with such ease these days I could very well copy and paste the review for #223 of this trilogy as nothing has changed. Last title the interrogation of the Politician was good well lets do it again only this time around the Preacher is the one interrogated. After ascertaining that the main bad guy Stone is of to the Everglades off the Big Guy goes on his trail. The discovery of the Militia's base camp in the swamp and the attack on it taking out most of the wanna be soldiers was not too bad reading. Problem ? Well yes as the author thought it was so good that hey why come up with any thing original hmm.... I know lets have these guys and a few other similar groups have a war games in the swamp and guess what we can just do it over and over again where the Big Guy just takes out members of different groups and moves on to the next group. Boring ..... If you manage to get anywhere near the ending of the title the main bad guy Stone has yet again nicked off and is run down somewhere in the Seychelles. How to find him ? Now any reader who has read some of this authors titles would already know the answer. If it was a female being held hostage needing to be rescued the Big Guy would issue a warning to those holding her that he wants her safely returned or he will take their house down piece by piece and attack various holdings until his demand was met. Okay this time around issue the same warning to the Police and Government that they should in fact give him up and off we go to destroy various establishments to reinforce our point. The title finishes thank goodness and off to read something original which may stimulate my brain after this rubbish. In case you were wondering I could not recommend any of the titles of this trilogy for your reading pleasure give them a miss.

Finally Newton brings us to the final volume of the so-called American Trilogy. This time the book at least takes place in America, so the title is fitting. This book begins where Call to Arms left off, Bolan, still on the trail of Christopher Stone, but for no real reason. This book is essentially the last book, removed from the Mexican desert and placed in the Florida swamps. Newton gives no backstory or motivation fro Bolan’s blitz and he plugs in the same tired and dull scenes over and over again with no filler until his 60,000 words are filled. The last two volumes of this trilogy are essentially an epilogue to Patriot Gambit stretched out over two books. They are nearly painful to get through and have no payoff to make the effort worthwhile. Call to Arms serves no purpose as far as story or character that was not covered better and clearer in Patriot Gambit. Newton’s characterization of Bolan is superb as usual, but the rest of the work gives me no reason to care. What began good in Patriot Gambit descended into a train wreck of lackluster crap in the last two books, especially here in Call to Arms.

wow i feel kind of dumb for only reading the last book of a trilogy and not realizing it. anyhoo it was a good book and it was the first of the executioner series and i made pretty good sense of it. It was very exciting in the swaps and the action was off the charts.

This was for me another typical Bolan story in which our hero goes from scene to scene without much background story. I find that the triologies of late lack the vital story line.

ah, the end of the american trilogy. i thought it was worth while. It had some good action and i liked that he did so much traveling.