Ralph Dula

I recently reviewed Skysniper here, which numbers as one of my all-time favorite Executioner novels. A short time after the review was posted it was pointed out to me that the author of Skysniper, Chuck Rogers, had also written the Able Team novel Miami Crush. That was both surprising and ironic to me, as I had read Miami Crush literally the day before I started Skysniper, and if I had known Chuck Rodgers had written Miami Crush I would never have touched Skysniper or any other book he wrote, as it numbers among the worst novels I’ve ever read set in Mack Bolan’s world. Where to begin with the horror that is Miami Crush? I’ll start with the prologue, seven pages of throwaway background that does nothing for the story. Truth to tell, I tried to read Miami Crush several months ago, but the beginning was so slow that I found myself putting it aside and forgetting about it until recently. So I finally slogged through the opening, wondering how the Pinto family and their tribulations would tie into the main story, only to find their connection to it was so minor that all the pages describing them could have been thrown out with no loss to the book. I normally like it when authors give backstory to characters and places in stories, but here it just felt like it was filler. Speaking of filler, the entire sequence with Judge Meyer went nowhere as well. Rodgers did something similar in Skysniper, come to think of it, introducing a villain who seems to have been totally forgotten about by the end of the novel. The same thing happens here, but whereas in Skysniper the distancing of the forgotten villain from his allies helped to explain why he survived and no one was worried about him, here we have someone who is face to face with one of the members of Able Team and who we have to read many pages describing his lack of morals, yet nothing happens to him. Maybe Rodgers planned to bring him back in a later book, and wanted to introduce him here, but if so he spent far too much time in Miami Crush doing so. Or maybe this book ran far over its intended length, and Meyer wasn’t edited out as he should have been. As for the focus of the books, I’ve only read a small portion of the Able Team series, but 2/3rds of them feel as though they should called “The Adventures of Carl Lyons and Some Other Guys” rather than “Able Team”. This one was no exception, with us getting treated to extended views of Lyons’ views on Julie, their relationship, his dating in general, and pretty much anything else about the character that Rodgers could think of so he didn’t have to write about Pol and Gadgets. I probably wouldn’t have minded this much, but as I said this Lyons fixation has been in nearly every Able Team book I’ve read so far, so I found it very annoying. Hal also seemed off in his brief appearances in the book. His manipulations of Lyons, keeping him in the dark at first about the death of his CI, even the descriptions of his mannerisms seemed unlike anything I’ve read in any Bolanverse novel. Finally, I was a little confused by the author’s desire to make the reader care about Lyons’ old CI. Unless I’m misreading something the CI killed Allan Ball and was using his car and checking account as he tried to hide from the enforcer hunting him down. Why are we supposed to care about somebody who, when his past caught up to him, turned to murder and impersonation of the dead to survive? Was Ball supposed to be a bad guy, so the CI killing him was okay? We don’t get any evidence in the book of that, so all I can figure was that Ball was just some guy the CI killed to make his life easier, and that makes Lyons’ desire for the CI to have justice done for him seem a bit, well, dumb. Unless you’re a completest, or just want to read a book so bad that it makes your blood pressure go up, I recommend avoiding Miami Crush.

I’ve been reading Mack Bolan novels for about five years now, and almost since I started I’ve listened to Bolan fans tell me how much they hated Skysniper. So when the opportunity came to pick up the novel last week I didn’t have high hopes for it. Imagine my surprise when I finished it and found that it had earned a place among my top four favorite Bolan books! The main reason I loved Skysniper was the main villain, Nemanja, who was a refreshing change from Bolan’s usual foes. Rather than being ruled by his emotions and prone to fits of fury that led to his subordinates’ deaths, he was calm, collected, and rational; in those ways I saw him as an opposite number to Bolan. Rather than executing his underlings for failure he accepted blame for the missions he organized when they failed, and he was actually able to make a good show against the Executioner in final combat, which was a radical shift from most of the big villains I’ve seen in Executioner novels. There was also a level of loyalty among the bad guys that’s a rare sight in a Mack Bolan story. Rather than constantly thinking of how to backstab one another for personal gain, the foes of democracy are trusting of one another and don’t end up gunning each other down, which I also like. I have to admit being afraid that this wasn’t going to hold true at the end of the novel, and it was going to slip back into the usual “no honor among thieves” code we see in Bolan novels, but Mukantabana’s reaction to his disloyal troops saved that portion of the book for me. I also liked the plan of Nemanja and his allies. It had a level of subtlety to it that you usually don’t find in a Bolan novel, and that impressed me. The way Rogers wrote of the injuries and bad climate at the beginning of the book really impressed me as well. To be honest, whenever I’ve read an Executioner novel in the past I’ve never really worried about what sort of harm befell Bolan, as I knew he was the title character and would be fine in the end. The opening pages of the novel, where he suffers from hypothermia and injuries actually drew me in, and for a bit I found myself actually worried about the Executioner’s safety. I never had that happen before, and was impressed Rogers was able to do that. Oh, and a novel where Bolan has no problem at all working with the CIA? Huzzah! Finally, I also thought the humor in it was sparse but good. All of it made sense in context with the rest of the book, and didn’t break up the serious tone of the story, as it has in some other Executioner novels. I must admit the CIA agent with the bad knee getting his leg blown off at the knee later on was a bit of perverse humor I enjoyed. All that being said, there were a few flaws in the book. The author does an excellent job of having things happening “off-camera”, with characters learning of these developments later on. However, sometimes he focuses on characters and then skips some needed description, with them standing at one place at the beginning of a paragraph and then having them have walked a fair distance or grabbing cover that was never mentioned before at the end of the next paragraph, with no description of them having taken those actions. Similarly, his descriptions (or lack thereof) of the enemy camp at the end also led to some confusion for me. And, to be honest, I had no idea Burton was black until near the end of the book, so when it was mentioned he had darkened this skin to match the natives I had this disturbing image of a white man going around in blackface makeup like an actor in the 1920s. I’m also a bit perplexed regarding Nemanja’s ability to ID the satellite sent to flush him out as a “top secret U.S. observation satellite” from information on the internet. While I understood from earlier in the book that amateur astronomers had been tracking “secret” satellite launches and listing their orbits online, the idea that there was an easy-to-read handbook ID’ing each satellite’s true function was a little hard to swallow; I assumed the satellites destroyed at the beginning of the book were ID’ed by the Serbians’ Russian allies, and thinking they were just ID’ed by a complete list on the internet took away from the story for me. Another problem with the book was the editing. There were some typos that were funny (like reading Stealth planes are invisible in daylight and that it’s an “Alpha” Romeo, a spelling error that’s in every Executioner I’ve read with Alfas) but there were some gaffs that left me wondering how they got in there, such as when the Serbian troops commander Professor Macs’ van and Bolan and Svarzkova don’t notice that fact, that left me feeling a bit shaky on the editing. And it wasn’t even until I started writing this review that I realized Stasny’s final fate is never mentioned, or if Bolan and friends ever learned of his existence. Was there a planned sequel novel to Skysniper where he was to meet his final fate, was a portion of the book involving him cut due to length of the story, or did the author just forget about him? Despite these flaws I feel this is one of the best Bolan novels I’ve read. I was hovering between giving this book a nine and a 10, but after recently reading a few books from another long-running fiction series that shall remain nameless that have had some horrible editing, I can’t really bring myself to give this book a nine for a few minor flaws. I highly recommend it, and ignore anyone on message boards who rips it down!