Sarge

A decent attempt to breathe some fresh air into what might have otherwise been another ho-hum gotta-stop-the-doomsday-plague story. The pacing and dialogue could have been better, but the action scenes were well-developed, as were most of the characters. Good job by Schmidt.

A lot of treading water here, as in padding what might have been a strong single volume into a three-parter. Some good scenes, however, and a nice storyline surrounding Hal's kidnapping. Better pacing and better dialogue would have made this a slam-dunk 9 or 10. As it is, though, it's still a better than average entry into the series.

An okay effort with an interesting X-files spin on things. It was difficult at times to keep track of all the different stories going on, but that's par for the course with Stony Man novels so it's hard to fault the writer. The action was better written than the characters and dialogue. The latter seemed pretty routine.

There are some solid passages here, but overall the book was rather choppy and at times felt like an unsuccessful attempt to cash in on the Grisham franchise (acknowledged at least by having a villian named Grishin). Not Odom at his best.

I found this book to be all over the place, which sometimes is a good thing but in this case made things seem too choppy. The strongest scenes were Bolan's clash with the RUF in Sierre Leone. Would have liked to see more done with this and less with some of the clunky filler, like the weight-lifting contest (would have made a great single chapter, but really dragged as it went on and on). And the scene where Pol deprograms some guys by feeding them cheese pizza seemed like something straight out of Austin Powers. Silly! And I agree with whoever said the cover was misleading.

Correction: The cult leader in Edge of Night is, of course, run by Immanuel Zion aka Vincent Gorman, not the Great Hikari, a similar color-by-number demagogue in StrangleHold, the five-starrer I'm presently reading. Sorry for the the mixup.

I think it was admirable for Kasner to try to mine a two-book tale out of what is basically a pun gone awry, i.e. what if the the millenium bug is actually a real bug, as in widespread plague? There are some great scenes here, but also, unfortunately, some real klunkers. The pacing felt a bit off, too, especially in places where it felt like Kasner was treading water and unnecessarily overexplaining certain things as if to extend the page count and inflate what might have been a one great kick-ass page-turner of a book into a two-parter that dragged more than it should have. The whole cult business seemed pretty routine, too, with the Great Hikara being pretty much a retread of nearly every cult leader to come down the pike in these series. I did like the layering in of a more personal storyline involving Barbara Price coming down with the virus.

Had to track this one down and see what the supposedly worst book on record in these series was all about. Once again (as with Rampage) I have to part company with the Renauld bashers: This guy seems to have learned somewhere that even action novels benefit from characterization, dialogue and plotting as much as they do a high splatter ratio (personally if I need a bang-bang-you're-dead fix I'll take over my son's video games for a few minutes till it passes). I found Pol being tortured by having a gila monster put in a cage over his head to be clever and inspired, if in a perverse way. And, yes, the white supremacists were a bit stereotypical, but they were still fleshed out more than more villains in these kind of books. Incidentally, who the hell is this 'echoes' moron? Somebody Renauld beat out for a job at some point? His unsubstantiated, knee-jerk reviews smack more of some personal vendetta than any sort of valid criticism, not to mention the fact his rubberstamping/ballot stuffing has made a travesty of this whole ratings process (he's from florida, yes?). Anyway, I like Renauld and thinks it's too bad he's moved on to whatever; he at least made an effort not to dumb things down and tried to offer something more than 300 pages of 'See Guys Shoot', which, I'm sorry, does not necessarily a good book make.

Found this at a used book store while on vacation and balked when I saw it was by Renauld, who gets mostly bad reviews here. Liked the idea of a shoot-em-up based around the Cannes Film Festival, though, and decided to give it a try. Good call!! Renauld gets a little too literary at times and he's more work to read than most, but it's worth it. RAMPAGE is well thought-out and choreographed, not crammed with the usual filler and stock scenes. The characters, especially the bad guys like Ali-Jahn, felt more three-dimensional than usual, too. A little more gunplay and action would've made this a 10, but as it is I'm going to look for some of Renauld's old Able Teams to see if they're better than the reviews.