Fridays Feast

I give this book 7 stars. I really liked the first couple of chapters with Leo. I really like the relationship between Mack and Leo. That paragraph at the beginning about Johnny was very good writing in my opinion. Then comes Frankie. Im getting tired of Frankie. But I guess that's what makes Mack so effective. Then comes Toby!! Enough already!! I wish Capitina Annoying would go away already. Oh well looking forward Don's grand finale.

Friday's down...one day to go. Friday's Feast wasn't Pendleteon's best, but it was a real good book none-the-less. Bolan is in Baltimore taking on the alias of Frankie Lambretta...."Black Ace". As in the previous book, Mack infiltrates a mob stronghold under the Black Ace name for the purpose "of making an assessment of their actions." In doing so, Bolan gets the mob bickering from within as he takes on the task of removing the 50 million dollars the mob has collected. This book contained one of my all-time favorite parts in the Executioner Series. Pendleton takes 2-3 pages to describe Leo Turrin's reflecting upon his appreciation and admiration for Mack Bolan. It's good stuff in terms of character development for both Turrin and Bolan. It's good stuff that is absent in many of the modern books.

Well somewhere I can remember an old saying that you can only go to the well so many times before it is empty or in so many words. Once again the Big Guy takes on the persona of Frankie the Black Ace from the head shed and takes over the location of where everything is happening. Unfortunately you just can't keep doing it over and over again and this title struggles big time, So much filler of what has gone before with different members of the Mob which has been done previously so many times even the addition of Toby Ranger is just an aside to break the monotony. The only thing that gains this title a couple of extra stars is the attack on the old freighter near the end and the final attack on the hard site but really that has all been done before as well. Probably so much time was devoted to Frankie and what he was up to in the hard site allowed the author to develop the character of a few of the Bad Guys so that come the ending section when they were mentioned by name the reader knew who was getting blown away. A little bit of a disappointment here with the second last title I am hoping for a lot better come the final title next.

May be the worst Mack Bolan ever written! This is a shame because all of the elements are present here to make this entry one of the best. There's something of a reunion of past recurring characters and Bolan goes undercover to uncover a plot that... isn't there! As he has been decimating the Mafia for so long, this would have been a nice twist. He could see the result of the war because there's nothing going on. All set against the backdrop of a murdered boss. With Bolan, Leo and one of the Rangers on the scene, it would have been great to play up the "Did you do it? Did you?" angle that is only touched on in the book we've got. But this book is a mess. I believe it is either a first draft that was turned in to meet a deadline or just the work of a very tired writer. The plot of this one kicks in around page 127. Yes, you read that right. 127. Up until then, everyone just talks in huge paragraphs and repeat earlier plot points. Literally nothing happens. Not one blessed thing. And Leo wanting to jump into the sack with Mack seems to be the product of an imagination wrung dry. Or, who knows, maybe Pendleton saw this down the road for the characters. We'll never know. It does jump out as being out of character for Leo. To say the least! And yet the book has a great cover! Well, I'm down to my last Pendleton. #38. I'm sure this one will be better than #37. #37 does serve one function however. For anyone who wants to write a Bolan, read this one. It gets everything wrong. This might be an effective tool for future Bolan scribes as to what NOT to do.

Lame, lame, lame…………………are the only words that come to my mind regarding this book. This second mile in the Mafia war is only a pale shadow of the earlier Mafia books and this second mile has been a huge waist of time to read so far and I can’t see any big changes in those few remaining ones for me to read!!! These books are bad copy cats of the other wise often fairly entertaining Mafia war books in the Bolan saga. Way too much space is used for Bolan´s philosophical thoughts instead of tighter focus on the plot and play. It seems to me like Pendleton was running out of fuel and didn´t have the material to make this book a good one but instead fills it up with nonsense like this. These books actually hit all time low with those strange sexual thoughts Leo has about “getting between the sheets with the guy”. I wonder what Pendleton was thinking with this part?????????????????? The only good thing about the book was Bolan´s black ace penetration which displayed time and time again how stupid those Mafia boys were and how easy it is to manipulate them and have them running around like headless chicken around their Bolan…………. their mortal enemy. To summarize this book………..it was lame from start to finish (Iceland – 2006)

I know it's for the wrong reasons, but I give this book a ten for the simple reason that it shows Don Pendleton was human after all and could flub a book with the best of them. There were way too many botched attempts to get inside the heads of the main characters and I agree with whoever said that Leo Turrin's musing were particularly unnerving. I don't know for sure, but my guess would be this might have been the book that first made Pendleton think of bowing out of the series rather than drive it into the ground when he'd clearly tapped himself out. IF so, it was a nobel gesture on his part and he deserves points for it. Oh, and the cover gets a 10, too. One of the better ones. Don't get this book if you're looking for Pendleton at his best, but as a scholarly excerise I think it has merit. So make it a 10 with an asterisk, ok?

I agree with Doug's review on this one, I was dissappointed that the climax of the week went down instead of up for this one. A decent but not gread read.

As Mack Bolan's "second mile" nears its end he makes his way to Baltimore to deal with the mafia presence there. After an opening with Bolan greeting Leo and with only a reference to some action that occurs offstage, the story bogs itself down in another one of those long "Bolan impersonates a black ace" sequences that continues until nearly the end of the book. In some of the earlier books in the series Bolan would actually do something before launching into one of these impersonations, and frequently he'd do something while he was pretending to be a mafia bigshot. In this book he just walks around pretending and spying, kind of just treading water while the plot elements are trotted out one by one. After Bolan ends his impersonation he engages in two bits of action, the first as he assaults a ship and then another when he returns to level the mafia hard site he had infiltrated. The ship attack wasn't very interesting but the hard site assault had some of the old Pendleton excitement. Unfortunately that was about the only place that old excitement could be found in this book. There is an appearance by one of the Ranger girls and Grimaldi is on hand also at the end. April Rose still seems like a wet banket and a sobbing wimp to me but she wasn't as annoying here for some reason. I am beginning to wonder if Mr. Pendleton had a hard time writing women from the inside who weren't tough and capable. One thing that did take me out of the narrative, pulling me outside the story to wonder about the telling of the story, was Leo's musing about his feelings for Mack Bolan as they left the hard site together. "Not that he wanted to lie down between the sheets with the guy, nothing like that for Christ's sake. But the love was there, and Leo was not all that sure that he would NOT lie down with the guy . . . if Mack Bolan turned out to be a little bit queer." Huh? What was Pendleton thinking? Don't know. Maybe he also had a hard time writing Leo from the inside this late in the game. Whatever the case, a picture like the one conjured up there I do NOT need in an Executioner story. I just didn't get enough fun out of this book to rate it any higher than 4 stars. If there had been a great (or even any) opening action scene it would rate another star. If Bolan had done something more than impersonate someone else to get info, a la Mission Impossible, for the middle 2/3 of the book it would rate another star. As it is I thought there were better uses I could have made of those several hours of my life, and I've never thought that before after reading one of Mr. Pendleton's books. So this one gets 4 stars, and that may be one star too generous.

This was a entertaining book.