Message to America

Starts out with a tense battle with Phoenix overseas tracking stolen nukes. But, in a change of pace, the next long segment is totally devoid of Stony Men and focuses on the main villains as their plans come to fruition. Then, all of the Stony Men, plus Mack Bolan engage the Sawtooth Patriots at their ranch in Wyoming to locate the missing nuke, but the leaders escape. Good action here, which leads up to a decent finale in New York. The AC-130 gunship got the best of it though, as the boys are relegated to flying around looking for the head man.

Well quite simply put this title is rubbish and don't bother. Gotta say more well okay the plot was ordinary, the storyline except for the final pages was barely keeping you interested, the character descriptions of the guys was ordinary at best. Now the ending was going okay here a suitable level of excitement has been obtained and can the nuclear shell be fired before the Teams can arrive to stop it? It is either the fifth or sixth shell folks and just prior to when they strafe the location the fifth shell is shot. The finish is absolute rubbish and such a let down when what happened is revealed and personally I thought to myself bullshit what a copout. Could not recommend this title to you in any way.

This was not a very spectacular book, it was really just a nuke of the week type story. A nuke of the week story with so much padding that it should have been a regular Executioner, if it were not for the fact that Bolan is nothing more than a member of Able Team and a very characterless member at that. The book and the action opens in Riga, with Phoenix Force trying to recover some nuclear artillery shells that are being sold by a corrupt Russian official to a Sicillian middleman. The action is okay, plus a Russian Spetznatz team is thrown into the fray (although these guys and gals are part of the books padding as they ultimately serve no purpose). Once that is over we are handed over to the villains, including the Sawtooth Patriots who have acquired a nuclear cannon shell and are planning to use it on an unknown target (the cover of the book gives it away). This is all explained over 100 pages, filled with the activities of fat radio presenters, FBI agents and informers who once again turn out to be nothing more than padding and contribute little to the story. I had the distinct feeling that the unnamed author had read several Stephen King books before hand so that he ould learn all about extra padding, unfortunately he (author X) is not as engaging. Bolan finally enters at page 144 as a member of Able Team. What he is doing there, or why he accepted this assignment isn't explained. After doing a little detective work, and using a lot of hypotheses from Stony Man, Able Team is joined by Phoenix Force (yes operating on US soil, hurray for that) in assaulting the Sawtooth Patriots hideout. This was a good fire fight. Of course the nuke isn't there, and the big bosses have all escaped. So the rest of the book (70 - 80 pages) is devoted to tracking down the villains using lots of leaps of logic until a final showdown is forced in New York, involving a Spectre Gunship. So all in all, pretty average with lots of padding.

This one certainly wasn't the worst, but it wasn't the best either. it's a typical story of " bad guys hijack nuclear weapon, and threaten to blow it up. Good guys fight the clock to find and disable it." The action wasn't bad, and the plot evenly paced. Mack seemed to play in the background while Able and Phoenix had most of the spotlight. there seemed to be a subplot with a soviet team looking for the weapon, too, but it didn't seem to really figure into the story well. All in all , not a bad read, but you aren't missing anything if you miss this one. 6 outta 10 stars

This one was a big letdown. I thought that with a Nuclear story line it would of been more action-packed. Had way too much character development. Would of been nice if they talked about the weapon more. Didn't make much sense for me. But the cover was cool though.

This was the first Don Pedleton book I had ever read. Since than I have been hooked. My screen name clearly shows this!