Guerilla Games

Phoenix force heads down to South America to save some hostages. The reason the Phoenix Forest is called it in is one of the hostages is a CIA agent and America wants them back safe. Some of the stuff gave me images Of Chuck Norris’s delta force movies. The stories and the characters were fun and kept the plot moving. But there’s very little action. In some of the action The geography was lost On me during the fight scenes. I never knew where everyone was in relation to everyone else. Spoilers! One of the hostages is killed ‘ off screen’ so you don’t know what happened. Also at the end of the story phoenix force literally walks into the bad guys base and asked for the keys to unlock the door and take the hostages home. You’re also wondering the whole book who the secret CIA agent is in the end of the book Yak says it doesn’t matter. So the whole time you’re wondering and trying to guess who they’re trying to save and the story ends and you never figure out.

Not the best book in the Phoenix Force series. Not that much action. I did like the Nord copilot and the French gunrunner. Not a very good start to my series. Im glad that the writing got better. I give it 6 stars.

Wow. I am shocked at the low reviews for this book. Some of the ratings are really harsh, with a 2-star in the mix. Granted, this book was not an action packed fire fight. Sure, there was a great deal of dialog. But in place of all that, there was a ton of character development and intra-team relationship building. And the most DEFINING moment in David's story arc! To wit, the horrific and numbing scene where David ruthlessly fires through a bloody, beaten, innocent farmer to kill the baddies using the poor man as a human shield. And nobody on the team bats an eye. For 10-12 pages, one reads wondering if this callous act is ever going to be addressed. Not until the last page does Encizo mention it, and David gives an emotional "did the guy a favor" speech and in a few well written words states what a terrible but necessary role Phoenix Force fills. Super powerful, terse, dramatic scene. Back in the early 80's I might have been tempted to rate this book lower based solely on lack of action. But after a current read, I cannot envision giving this go-round any less than perfect. Perhaps the author's only fault (since he never appears to write another entry) was writing this 30 years too early. This book is better suited for today's readers who will accept and embrace a slow moving spy thriller over an action filled shooter. Now, let me be clear...I love action shoot 'em ups as well, look at other reviews of mine. But I don't think we should punish this book for trying something different.

This one was pretty dreadful. The concept is interesting: hostages are released, only to be taken hostage once again. But the author does nothing to make it interesting. In the 180 + page story, there is pretty much no action whatsoever. Which I can live without if the author has a really good story or character development he wants to focus on. But the story is flimsy, almost non-existent. The supporting characters and Phoenix Force boring and bland. The majority of the novel consist of PF talking and moving into position. And talking. And moving. And talking. And moving. They don't really do anything for the entire novel. Only really memorable scene from this one was the bad guy pulling out the teeth of the one hostage. Besides that this is an entirely forgettable title.

This was a decent book...not great, but not bad. Other than book 1 a few months ago, I last read the PF series in the late 80s, so this is interesting going back through now. I was hoping for quite a bit more coming out of the first in the series, Argentina Deadline. With the characters initially being laid out in book 1, I thought the emphasis would be to further develop. However, that didn't happen...to any extent. There was very little character development of the main five. Further, Charma could've been a great antagonist, but he was not used as much as could've been. The story begins when some Americans continue as hostage in South America. PF is called in as one of the hostages is a key governmental employee (though I don't remember actually ever finding out which one). I agree with other reviews...I really like the Sweetie Pie character and thought he brought something very likeable to the story. His interaction with McCarter/Manning was good writing, with good dialogue. After the first 20-30 pages (spit scene), the story just sort of floated along and never really picked up any steam. I thought a lot more could've been done between the PF, paramilitary, and the guerillas. Decent, not terrible....hope for more in later titles as I remember this series being much better.

This is a fair read relating to what the hostages endure during their capture especially what happens to one of the women after having spit into the face of the terrorist leader. (BAD MOVE) There is an excellent character introduced named SweetiePie who is a French black market gundealer known to McCarter and stays on until the end of the title. Certainly a character I would like to be reintroduced in a future title. The storyline is okay but sort of cruises through and all of a sudden you have finished the title I thought to myself well it could have been better. Some character development between members of the team and Keio was a lot better in this one. Recommended reading in this series.

I picked up this one because it was written by the great Dan J. Marlowe, one of the best hardboiled writers to ever put pen to paper. Stephen King dedicated his Colorado Kid to Marlowe. A great, great writer. I'm not a big fan of the Phoenix Force books, but I did enjoy this one. Enough so that it got me thinking about the others. Action does take a bit of a back seat in this one, but good writing makes up for it and we get to learn more about the characters. This doesn't happen too often in books of this type so it's always a treat when it does. Because of this one, I might dive into Phoenix Force again.

I BARELY finished this one, it's not that it was badly written, it was just really , really boring. Nothing happened ! And the characters just seemed really different, I know it was only the second book, but you would have no idea that Katz is the leader in this one, its Raf all the way, Manning and McCarter seemed okay, but the characters were kinda wandering around through the jungle doing nothing. Sorry, it was a waste of time.

I have to disagree with Dan Xavier's review. I actually wish the author had spent less time with the hostages and more with Phoenix Force. Granted, this wasn't the best of the Phoenix Force novels, but back in the day, it was a hell of a lot better than most of the other monumentally turdish turds clogging the marketplace and certainly was not an embarrassment to the franchise. To be honest, I enjoyed it quite a bit. Prior to reading this, all I had read was Argentine Deadline and, perhaps, Stony Man Doctrine....I went on to read the entire series. And, Dan, did you have to disrespect the K-Man? Nothing against Calvin James, who is a fantastic character that I would never utter even one negative word about, but Keio was the friggin' man! We're talking about a heroic, noble, complex, young Japanese man given a chance to shine back when it was practically politically correct for Americans to hate the Japanese. You gotta appreciate that, but, perhaps most importantly of all, Keio was, like, COOOOOOOL.

The only good parts I liked about it were the hostages and Sweetie-Pie the French gundealer. The hostages should have gotten more time. To me they were interesting. I also would have liked to have known or at least had some clues who was the government worker that needed savings. The rescue mission was kind of blaise. Nothing too memorable about it. I also found all the PF characters so flat. Nothing really distinguinshing them. Lets see imagine you never read any Stony Man novels and only PF1. Would you really buy book 3 in this series? I don't think so. Yes I have read a few SM novels and other PF novels so the characters are distinct but trying to look at it from a perspective of 1982 - no I would not have continued. Let me just state that Calvin is a far better character then KO.

A decent entry, kind of average adventure. I like the cover art.

Some hostages have just been released after ransom is paid to their guerilla captors in Bolivia. The plane they're headed out of Bolivia on is forced down and they are captured again by some Paraguayan guerillas. This makes the Paraguayan military mighty pissed so they send a lieutenant and some troops out to the island where the hostages are being held. The Paraguayan military kills or captures the guerillas and rescues 4 of the hostages, taking all of them to a secret police holding facility. This one had some action at the end. . . Hang on. I forgot about Phoenix Force. Which is easy to do because they have absolutely nothing to do with the plot until they burst into the holding facility in the last 2 chapters to rescue the hostages. Up to that time they just waste a lot of time moving into the country and toward the area where the hostages are held, arriving just in time to witness the Paraguayan soldiers assault the island and remove the guerillas and hostages. Oh, yeah, they do find one hostage that is hurt and has crawled into the brush. For a Phoenix Force novel there sure didn't seem to be much going on with Phoenix Force. Not that they weren't in the narrative a lot. They were. There just wasn't much happening when they were on stage. OK, like I started to say, not much action until the assault on the guerilla camp which was pretty lame and didn't involve Phoenix Force anyway. Then at the end there's the killing of a few hapless guards for their uniforms and the rescue of the hostages from the secret police. Not a lot to keep you interested here. No wonder it took me so long to finish this one. I'm giving it 4 stars. As a book at might rate 5 stars but as a Phoenix Force book it only gets 4: I expect Phoenix Force to at least have some impact on the story before the last 2 chapters. In this book they're mostly ineffectual or inconsequential.

This one was about the same as #1. Not the explosive action that I had become used to reading from Phoenix.

I agree with Gunslinger -- this one's on par with #1, which makes them a matched set in the fact that they are, in many ways, vastly different than the way the series and the team ended up.