Mark Allen

Entries like this not only make me miss the skilled writing of series creator Don Pendleton, but are the reason I stopped reading The Executioner 20 years ago. While Pendleton created a fascinating character in Mack Bolan, far too many recent authors have settled for churning out generic action-adventure novels under The Executioner banner. "Murder Island" feels like just another soulless, assembly-line entry in the series. No disrespect to author Joshua Reynolds, but it just felt like his heart wasn't in it this time around. The plot is yet another homage/variation/ripoff of "A Most Dangerous Game," with humans being hunted for sport. Normally I enjoy these kind of stories, but it all just seemed so perfunctory and lacking any semblance of tension, suspense, or even style. Even the action came across as woefully lackluster...despite Bolan wrestling with saltwater crocodiles in a scene that was eyerollingly ludicrous. Bottom line, this one isn't worth hunting down unless you absolutely have to read every Executioner novel ever written.

I would kill a basket full of kittens if every Executioner entry could be this good. Author Mike Linaker, one of the most popular Executioner writers, coolly captures the old-school feel of early Mack Bolan with a plot that finds our never-say-die hero lethally locking horns with the Mafia once again in his War Everlasting, and as usual, it's a take-no-prisoners approach. The guns come out and the bad guys perish, simple as that, because The Executioner shows mercy only to innocents, not his enemies. Even better, Linaker brings a welcome bloody edge to the violence, eschewing the sterilized, PG-13, "the target went down" style that seems so popular with latter-day Bolans in favor of more visceral action descriptions. Brains get blown out, bones shatter, blood spurts, and organs are pulverized, which in my useless opinion is the way it should be in action-adventure novels. Or maybe I'm just an unrepentant gore-hound... I've just recently resumed reading The Executioner series after a 20-year hiatus and just as I remembered from back in the day, they are hit-and-miss affairs. But entries as good as "Kill Squad" make me glad to once again call myself an Executioner fan.

Currently the best-rated "Executioner" novel on this site and it's not hard to figure out why--it dared to do something different with the Executioner formula. For years, even decades, a stable of writers reliably churned out Executioner entries that rarely strayed from the successful path that made the series the top gun (pun definitely intended) in the men's action-adventure market. But while there is comfort in familiarity, weariness sometimes seeps in as well. "Prison Code" serves as a wake-up jolt, not only inserting our titular hero in an unorthodox setting, but also giving him a wise-cracking edge that we've never seen. In fact, some of Bolan's dialogue is so out of his usual stern/grim/serious character that it seems completely OUT of character. Truthfully, if you cling religiously to the Executioner canon, you might almost view this as a negative ... except it's so much fun. Seriously, the publisher should take note of how enthusiastically fans responded to this entry and let The Executioner off his formulaic leash more often. We've come a long way since the Don Pendleton days, but we have not yet walked the last mile, and "Prison Code" shows there's still life left in the series.

Back in the '80s, I devoured The Executioner and all its various spinoffs (Able Team, Phoenix Force, etc.) but as the '90s rolled into town and the plots became monotonously "terrorist of the month" oriented, I abandoned the series and vowed it would be a cold day in Hell before I returned. Well, break out the ice skates and get ready to play hockey in Hades, because 20 yrs. later I find myself once again drawn to the heroic, justice-serving, cool-cat warrior that is Mack Bolan. After two decades of Flynn and Thor and Clancy and all the political machinations that buffer the action in those thrillers, it was a refreshing change of pace to read a straight-forward action-adventure yarn again. The pace was swift, the writing very competent, and the action scenes plentiful. Any gripes to peddle? Well, just one--the sterility of the violence. One of the reasons I bailed on Bolan back before the turn of the millennium was because the series had significantly tamped down on the explicitness of the action scenes. Bloody brain bits and skull shards no longer splashed the wall; instead, we get kills like, "The Beretta spoke and the target went down." In other words, The Executioner went "PG-13" and frankly, it kind of sucked. Sad to say, it appears 20 years later that nothing has changed in the violence department (unless it just happens to be this particular writer). Not saying I need a splatterpunk-style gore-fest (though I wouldn't complain!), but I do prefer my action scenes to be on the bloodier, "R-rated" end of the spectrum. But that quibble is not a deal-breaker. I enjoyed my return to the bullets-blazing world of Bolan and will definitely check out more of The Executioner's modern-day incarnation.