Night Heat is not only the worst Bolanverse books I have read but one of the worst books I have read period. It amazes me that a book can be at once enragingly offensive and mind numbingly boring. Cain manages to give us a book that is disjointed and at times incomprehensible. The characters are flat macho douchebags who we care nothing about. And when I say care nothing about they are the kinds of people I would gladly kick in the teeth if they were real.
If Night Heat is to be believed, and what are books if they are not an extension of the real world, then the US CBP (Customs and Border Patrol) are elite paramilitary units who risk their lives daily. The border between the US and Mexico is both marked by a dilapidated barbed wire fence and is a no man’s land that neither country wants to claim. I am curious how it can both be marked and be a vague area of badland. And, of course, the most important thing we must remember from Night Heat is that every last Mexican is dirty, smelly and has a burning desire to live in the US. Every single one of them. And because of this(?) the CBP hates them. If someone despises Mexicans so much why would they join the CBP? There is so much wrong with Night Heat that I would have to write a book longer then it just to point out all the flaws.
What Cain has given us with Night Heat is a book that would have been better served being published by a white supremacist publisher somewhere, not Gold Eagle. On every page the reader is assailed with a ceaseless flow of racial slurs in both the dialogue and the narrative. Cain even goes so far as to portray the rape and murder of Mexicans as an amusing pastime. Not just a pastime for the everyday American but for the CBP officers who live and work the border every day.
Good fucking grief this was a travesty of bullshit on the highest order. By the original works of G.H. Frost and Tom Arnett, this was no fucking way Able Team, not the guys who fought the Facist International to protect innocent meztizos. No, this is some racist fuckwad's intrusion into the actions of three warriors for justice for the excuse to murder wetbacks to his masterbatory heart's content.
Nicholas Cain is a fucking piece of shit who helped fuck the later Able Team series with a chainsaw. If you see this book anywhere, pull it from the stacks, piss on it, pour lighter fluid on it, and burn it! THIS BOOK SUCKS!
Doug is right, this novel is a cow pie, and I stepped right in it.
Good thing I got this book as one of the "four free books" from GE a while back, this novel is worth what I paid for it, lol.
Night Heat squeezes a second star out of its ass only because the first third of the book isn't too bad, and I got a couple chuckles from some of the banter between the guys.
But the mess starts getting bad.
Able Team's intelligence drops more and more as the pages go by.
Cain's plot development sucks.
Able Team spends more time beating off as the border patrol does most of the work, which isn't much more than going scene to scene looking at dead bodies that have been shot by some people with guns.
Almost no perspective from anything other than AT. Which is too bad because they don't do much.
No "nuke packing terrorists out to destroy America" as stated on the back cover.
Cain continues to screw with the readers mind by anticipating something about to happen, but then nothing. Again, and again.
Gadjets sneaks up to a building containing bad guys. A gun is placed at the back of his head. But never mind, just the Border patrol beating off, and tells Gadjets the guys have left the building. Just one example.
Again, as in Kill Orbit, Cain has unknown people shooting guns somewhere, then they leave. AT is rarely if ever involved. Gadjets screws a chick that has betrayed them, and screws her later on, never mind she's a bad guy.
The banter gets old.
The action is missing.
The plot goes nowhere.
The book could only be improved if Lyons were to grab an Atchisson and blow the brains out of Gadjets, Pol, Brognola, all the border patrolman, the cops, the mexicans, women, children, babies, puppies, kittens, doves, your grandma, and then turned the gun on himself.
It wouldn't matter because this isn't really an Able Team novel anyway.
Just a big cosmic cow pie. From a cosmic mad-cow diseased bull.
MMMMMOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!
I remember freshly as if it were yesterday the bitter stench of disappointment in this cow-pie novel. The back cover announced a return to the good-old days of Able Team, battling head-to-head with the Salvadoran Secret Police and the KGB, with nuclear weapon smuggling terrorists thrown into the mix. Add in the opening scenes gave me the hope to see a few Coyotes (illegal alien smugglers) get wiped out for brutalizing helpless indigos...And what does it all turn out to be? Let's play "mother may I" with the Border Patrol, forget about slamming the El Salvadoran death squads in the chops just like old times, and "who the hell really cares about a few wetbacks getting waxed?" On top of that, the only way you could recognize Ironman, Gadgets and Politician was by the names Lyons, Schwartz and Blancanales tacked onto some three generic macho idiots. Cain should have stuck to writing his own characters, or gone to chasing cretins across rooftops with his P226 before he dared ruin the good name of Able Team.
