Sleeping Dragon

After suffering through the American Trilogy, Deep Attack was a very pleasant surprise. Following the death of an Alameda Coast Guard boat crew slain by drug traffickers, Bolan is on the hunt of a cartel led by Estavan Quesada, also known as the Cat. I'm guessing he's represented on the cover by the vaguely John Travolta-looking chap. Lots of good action scenes and setpieces carry Deep Attack's simple story along at a whiplash pace. Aside from the cartel flunkies, Bolan also finds himself at the mercy of the elements. In a particularly exciting sequence, he has to navigate a motor launch through a storm, weaving through buffeting winds, hammering rain and violent waves. Robbins does a great job adding variety to the combat, throwing in just about everything and the kitchen sink. Fistfights, shootouts, boat chases, knife fights, it's all there. Deep Attack isn't a long book. It's actually shorter than the average Executioner from this time period. And while it's not complex, Robbins somehow manages to cram a fair bit of meat into its simple narrative. Except for an ending. Somehow he failed to include one of those. Still, this was a great read.

There exists an extremely rare brain disease called fatal insomnia in which a person loses the ability to sleep, ultimately resulting in death between a few months and a few years. If you liquefied the previous book and this one and injected it into the human brain, you might just very well have a cure of this horrifying disease. Call to Arms is just Hour of Conflict 2: Electric Boogaloo but with slightly, ever so slightly, more plot. It's revealed here that Stone is working with a Hezbollah chieftain named Afif Rahman and they want to stage a bunch of terrorist attacks and raids on American soil with right-wing groups as scapegoats to make people lose faith in the American government or something. Why Rahman and Stone need each other for this I don't know, and don't really care either. Even then, it's all rather vague as to what they hope to accomplish by doing this, and the page numbers were much more interesting overall. Did you know that page 158 comes after 157, and is followed by 159? Isn't that crazy? So we start off with Bolan in the Evergaldes in pursuit of Stone, getting into a series of battles with guys in airboats. Bullets fly and stuff blows up. Then he takes on some far-right militia groups playing wargames somewhere and kills them, too, then it's back to the Everglades for more shootouts and explosions. Just an aside: there's a much better Executioner book written by this author that took place in the Everglades, called Paramilitary Plot. You should check it out instead of reading this tripe. Then it turns out Stone and Rahman have escaped to the Seychelles, where the second half of the book takes place, and we get the obligatory sniper scene and cage rattling, then the bad guys bite the dust with insultingly underwhelming sendoffs and you wonder just how any of this crap warrants a total of 180,000 words across three books. Newton does this infuriating thing where he introduces characters, gives them entire backstories and gets into their heads just so he can kill them off pages later. He did this because he didn't feel like developing this raiding party idea from the previous paragraph, probably because he wasn't getting paid enough to give a fuck, so he fills the pages with navel gazing before hopping into the head of some other character and repeating the process. And since he clearly didn't give a fuck, you won't either. Then you're on the final page, page 220, and it's finally, mercifully over. Skip Hour of Conflict and Call to Arms. Just read Patriot Gambit instead and tell yourself that Stone died in that one and the lady fed got away somehow.

After the events of Patriot Gambit, Mack heads off to Mexico in pursuit of mercenary Chris Stone, who escaped at the climax of the previous installment with the obligatory lady fed as a hostage. A strong beginning where Bolan interrogates a friend of the Paul Revere militia deceives the reader into thinking this might be another even mix of plot and action like Patriot Gambit, before pulling that rug out from under them. What follows is 200 pages in which the big guy constantly bitches about Stone eluding him, then getting into pointless shootouts with religious cultists, ultimately achieving nothing but racking up a body count on par with Dan Schmidt. I was briefly intrigued when it was mentioned that one of these religious groups ride into battle on dune buggies or somesuch, which bears no relevance to the overarching story or has much to do with anything. This is that kind of book. This completely pointless detail is the most interesting part of Hour of Conflict. Somehow Bolan manages to rescue the lady fed and kill the leader of the evil religious commune, but Stone once more gets away, and Bolan is once again on the chase. The problem with Hour of Conflict and the next title is that they have no plot to speak of. It's just a bunch of gunfights and shit blowing up with no real direction until the last 20 pages, when we're at what is arbitrarily the final battle of the book. And you will suffer throughout most of these 200 pages, because they're all boring as hell. But once you finish this one, there's only one more book to go. Surely the payoff is worth it. Right? Ha. Hahaha. Guffaw, even.

The first and unfortunately the strongest entry of the American Trilogy sees Mack Bolan infiltrating the Paul Revere militia, a paramilitary group up to no good. Their grand scheme is to cause general havoc that doesn't serve any real purpose except annoying the American people. I disagree with the notion that the first book of a trilogy is the hardest to write; if anything, I'd find it to be the easiest, because you can let all your ideas go hog wild and not elaborate or develop them further in the succeeding two installments, because you're just phoning it in as a writer at this point. Because of this, Patriot Gambit is significantly more entertaining than the following two titles of the trilogy. The plot is fairly ho-hum, nothing we haven't seen before by this point in the series, especially by Mr. Newton, who by this point in his career was simply copy and pasting scenes from previous installments of his and changing names as necessary. This book is something of an anomaly because despite having several standout scenes, like the wargames the militiamen participate in, the armoured car robbery, and Bolan's rivalry with Lou Doyle, it's all written very blandly, as if Newton was forcing himself to churn this out. In my review of #200 Prime Target, I decried its action scenes as being perfunctory, happening without any build up or satisfying payoff, and the same is true here. This is not a book with a huge body count, but you're doing something wrong if I'm yawning while reading a shootout in the middle of a busy street. Overall this is a decent start to a trilogy that didn't need two extra books. Boy, it really didn't need those two extra books.

I'm not sure how to review this title. On the one hand, it plants the seed of Bolan deciding to sever his alliance with the US government and sets up the feud with his archnemesis, Greb Strakhov. Bolan is hurting and more vulnerable than we normally see him, which is a plus, and overall I feel there's a fantastic balance between story and action. It reestablishes Bolan returning to his lone wolf vigilante ways and stacks the odds completely against him. However, Alan Bomack is a terrible writer and I would've preferred this story go to somebody more capable, ideally Newton or - and I may get crucified for this - Peter Leslie. Bomack's prose is shoddy and he has a very poor sense for pacing, and that becomes very apparent during the second and third parts of the book. Despite the unwieldy length of 380 pages, of which you could sacrifice a solid sixty and not lose anything, the story's pacing becomes too fast. It has less to do with Bolan running out of time on his mission and more to do with Bomack realizing he's getting closer and closer to his word count, and with the choppiness of the second and third portions of the book (especially the third), I'm guessing he exceeded it and some editor took a hatchet to the manuscript. By my calculations this book is somewhere around 95,000 words, yet other, later SuperBolans were significantly longer, over the 100,000 word range. There's also the issue of time. I'm not sure how long this adventure took. Bolan travels quite a lot throughout Terminal Velocity but it still feels like this book is supposed to take place over just a few days. Again, this is due to Bomack's issue with pacing and he jumps around a lot. Bolan needs to go to Russia? Boom, he's in Russia. Paris? Say no more, there he is, lickety-split. Chuck Rogers has the same problem. There's a cast of thousands, a great deal of them on the KGB side and aside from Strakhov, none of them are interesting. The plan to frame Bolan, which drives a majority of the book's narrative, is conjured up by some guy named Vichinsky, who is so bland as a character he comes off less as a central villain and more like any other KGB stooge. Bolan makes plenty of allies on his travels and it comes off as absurd that everyone is so quick to befriend him, and this only happens because the plot calls for it. Not a single person he meets is suspicious of him, they all want to help him out because... well, they just do, I guess. Along the way he finds himself in an increasingly outlandish series of situations and by the time he befriends the French duchess Marijana, I had checked out and kept looking at the page numbers, wondering when this cavalcade of random bullshit would finally end. Thankfully his final pair of encounters against the villains are more grounded and straightforward even though I expected them to be on the moon, even feeling a little cheated that they weren't. Maybe I'm just impossible to please. I did like the imagery of Bolan leaving April Rose's ring on the corpse of his impostor at the end, a nice touch of symbolism for a series that's the literary equivalent of junk food. I wouldn't call this book a disappointment, but I do feel it's the weakest part of the trilogy and tries to be too big for its own good. I consider a 5 to be an average rating and this book is above that, but not far. It got the series back to its roots, and it's unfortunate Bolan didn't remain a lone wolf vagabond for long afterward.

In a sense this is the end of an era, since this was the last Executioner book released in paperback. This book is a bit like Body Armor in that Bolan's opponents are superhumanly strong, and the presentation is just as laughably absurd. The bad guys have had all their weak points modified, as an unnamed superman points out during the finale while beating the hell out of the Executioner, kindly informing us that in times of stress their dick and balls partially retreat into the body so groin attacks are impossible. There's also a thin titanium shield of some kind behind their eyes and strangulation is impossible due to a "highly resistant material" in their throats, among other things. Interestingly, Combat Machines only has two action scenes, both of which are several chapters long. As a result we get more development than usual with the supporting characters, a very nice touch. Some good, well-written characters are along for the ride, particularly Palomer, Bolan's obligatory female sidekick who, despite dying near the end of the book like most of his women partners, at least goes out memorably. There are also Sevaron and Zimin, a pair of Russian cops, but they aren't as interesting. The villains don't have anything resembling an original even plan but this is the 449th entry and originality died long ago. Despite that, they're at least written well and are actually threatening. Combat Machines unfortunately ends on a cliffhanger that will likely never be resolved due to the series' cancellation, so Dr. Utkin, the Russian doctor responsible for these super-soldiers, holds the rare honour of escaping capture entirely. From all the Executioners I've read so far, the only other villain in this category is the guy from the Lord of the Seas trilogy. A solid, exciting read.

"This Pirates of the Caribbean bullshit is bullshit. You read me?" -Jack Grimaldi. I do, but that's part of the fun. Blood Tide is a zany ride about pirates, middle eastern mysticism and Japanese martial arts with some sword stuff for good measure. Or as I call it, a Chuck Rogers Executioner novel. I seriously wonder if he ever looked at his previous works and tried topping himself in ridiculousness with each following installment. I noticed reviewers claiming that Body Armor's plot was far-fetched, but this one takes the cake. Bolan goes undercover to infiltrate a pirate cult led by the Mahdi, a mysterious and interesting villain whose surprisingly level-headed with his actions. Along for the ride are Marcei Mei, Bolan's obligatory lady sidekick and Ming, a Japanese mobster and sword aficionado who teaches Bolan a thing or two about blade combat. As it is a Chuck Rogers romp, there's plenty of action scenes, world building and a well-thought out plot heavy on religious imagery and mythology that'll keep you glued to the pages. But, as it is a Chuck Rogers romp, the central bad guys are defeated in pitifully underwhelming and anticlimactic ways despite being built up as imposing and unstoppable. The ending, as mentioned in previous reviews, was extremely weak and the book just kind of stops on page 219. I'm not even sure how Rogers managed this - the book's obviously somewhere around 66,000 words, which appeared to be the standard for the series at this point. And somehow an ending never happened. Oops. Overall, an enjoyable yet anticlimactic tale. The similarly-named Crimson Tide was a better pirate book in my unwanted opinion.

Body Armor was one of those Executioners I'd been dying to read for some time but could never find. Of course I found every other book in the 220s but not this one until recently, and it was definitely worth the hype I'd generated for myself. It's rare to see Bolan go up against an opponent that can match him in skill or even just but up a decent fight. A lot of books like to hype up their bad guys as vicious threats, but when it comes to an actual encounter against Bolan they suddenly can't tell their firearm from their dick. With the Juggernauts, Fieldhouse created a very menacing and intriguing group of evil stormtroopers whose armor makes them nigh-invulnerable and gave them ammunition that can turn your head to mush. Most of Bolan's encounters with them end with him just barely escaping, and it's not until the last 60 pages or so he actually kills one for the first time. By sheer luck. Unfortunately, the book is rather short despite its page count (220), with slightly larger-than-average text and margins. As a result we get a fast-paced story but only provides the most bare bones of motivations and character traits for the bad guys. They're all former military and intelligence agency types, and that's about all we get. Bafflingly, Raymond Stylles, the main villain, gets the least characterization despite the novel spending more time in his head than either of his cohorts. And we don't get much about them either. Surprisingly, despite this being a Fieldhouse novel, the hand-to-hand stuff is contained to a couple brief skirmishes and the fistfight against Stylles at the end. Of course, a punch from one of their studded gloves, described by Kissinger as a "steel war club" is probably enough to blast your jaw apart. Aside from the bad guys' lack of characterization, there is one major missed opportunity: Bolan never uses their own armor against them. Having Bolan go up against them dressed in their own battle armor would have made the finale much more interesting. A recommended read.

Mediocrity at its finest. I should've known what I was in for when I read the blurb on the back, because whoever wrote it had no idea what the book was about. And it's hard to fault them, because judging from the reviews here and my own experience the average reader didn't either. I'm not sure what a "techno-warfare" expert is or does, but unless Schneider dropped some sick beats over African villages off-page I'm pretty sure he's not one. Prime Target isn't hard to read, but it's totally lifeless until the fight between Bolan and Schneider... which happens at the 200-page mark. Oof. I got to the first action scene and had no idea I was even reading one until I was near the end of it. It's that kind of book. All the action scenes are perfunctory, happening without any buildup, tension, or excitement, and then they're over and it's on to the next chapter. Also, plotholes a plenty here! They're so big you could hurl a Desert Eagle through 'em. Why were the GPS access codes or whateverthefuck not changed when they fell into Schneider's possession? Why does he even need to disable the GPS in the first place when all he's doing is stealing from his boss's bank accounts? Why the hell couldn't Stony Man themselves just change the access codes? Why did Schneider's first name change from Gunther to Remy? Why didn't the eagles just take Frodo and the ring to Mordor? None of this makes any goddamn sense! Still, if you actually bother to read this one - and it really is as middle of the road as you can get - you'll probably get through it easily enough. But keep in mind you won't get those hours back.

I don't normally buy SuperBolans when looking for something to read, and books like this are why. It's all my fault, really. Whenever I see a SuperBolan I'm always sure to check out who ghostwrote it before actually buying it. I did not do that with Force Lines until after I got home, and felt an immediate sense of dread when I saw the first two letters of Dan Schmidt's name. So I open the book and see big margins and text. He can't write a plot worth shit, and hadn't even tried since... I don't know how long. So I hoped that, even if this book turned out to be garbage, it would at least be a quick read. It was not. Somehow I managed to make it to 120 pages, but they were the longest 120 pages of any SuperBolan I've read so far. As far as I can tell, the book is about some terrorist cult called the Sons of Revelation getting their hands on a mix-and-match of various toxin strains and then doing oh who gives a shit. In my experience most SuperBolans struggle to even get to 250 pages, let alone 350 or even 315, and there's nothing here that warrants 120. I wouldn't say Dan was phoning it in, because that would be giving him praise. And there's nothing worth praising in Force Lines, an unreadable brick of wasted paper that could've gone to something better, like an issue of Penthouse. There's no direction, no substance to be found here, just long, winding sentences that read more like the lamentations of a brain damaged orangutan who took one lump of thrown shit to the head too many. Which is a real shame, because Schmidt could bang out some damn fine yarns when he wanted to. The Executioners Blood and Thunder, Devil's Horn, Death Force, and Stealth Striker are testaments to this. On the SuperBolan side we have Code of Bushido, Renegade Force and Deep Treachery. Read those instead.

I don't normally go for SuperBolans when looking for something to read, but entries like this make me glad I do every now and then. Bolan's in Mexico and finds himself battling against a brutal, insane drug cartel/Satanic cult fronted by The Beast, some kind of former German black ops specialist kook gone rogue. Armed to the teeth and brainwashed and crazy, the cartel spend most of the novel hunting Bolan and his party down, until the finale, when he does it to them. Along for the shenanigans are a cast of colorful characters, but if I go into describing them this review would be much too long. However, I'll say this: killing off the first team of ragtag misfits was totally pointless. Why? Because the people who join Bolan afterwards are the exact same templates, just with new names and alphabet organization backgrounds. Action scenes are plentiful, exciting and well written. There's a body count bordering on Dan Schmidt levels and sometimes it seems like a shootout takes place for no reason other than to meet the word count. The most disappointing fight in the book is, sadly, the confrontation between Bolan and The Beast; the entire fight lasts only two paragraphs before Bolan kills him. There's a very thin plot here. It's little more than a revenge story, but Chuck Rogers' wacky-ass ideas make it livelier than if, say, Newton or Schmidt had written it. A cartel who takes its victims' heads? Yawn. A cartel whose members have RFID chips in their ears that instantly brainwashes them and allows The Beast to come forward, like they're possessed? Nice. A highly recommended entry in this series.

Two stories in one here. The first sees Mack trying to arrest Byron Cloud, a cocky arms dealer and wannabe mobster. The second half takes place on the titular island after their planes are shot down by the bad guy's turret when they soar over his island. What I don't get is how Joshua Reynolds could take a cool and simple premise and execute it in such an unremarkable way. It wouldn't call this a by-the-numbers Executioner, since there's no backpack nukes, mafiosi, or terrorists blowing shit up because no reason. Bolan is thrown into a situation he has no control over, pitted against cruel and psychopathic forces, and is forced to do it unarmed, no less! And somehow it just falls flat. The first half has some exciting stuff, and starts with Bolan wrestling a tiger in Cloud's apartment. The villain for this part of the story is a mercenary named Meltzer, who later appears on the island in cahoots with the main villain, Rainsford. Random trivia time: Rainsford was the name of the hero of The Most Dangerous Game, which this novel rips off. Anyway, the first half of the novel moves along at a breathless pace and segues beautifully into the second part. Despite Bolan's life being at stake and being forced to fight against nature and Rainsford - who's more like Zarloff, the bad guy of TMDG - it's nowhere near as interesting as it should be. His only ally is Cloud, who does fuck-all until he whacks Meltzer. It doesn't help that the hunt only lasts five chapters and doesn't have any room to develop. Was this supposed to be a SuperBolan? It sure seems like it. In spite of this, the bad guys' deaths are satisfying enough and everything somehow manages to be wrapped up neatly. In my unwanted opinion, Murder Island probably should've been a "Mack goes on vacation but everything goes to shit" kind of adventure. The way he winds up on the island wouldn't need to be changed, and it would've been a good excuse to throw in Grimaldi. It makes for an OK read as is, but could've been a hell of a lot better. You could always just read The Most Dangerous Game but substitute Rainsford for Mack instead.

Goodness me, a Dan Schmidt novel that doesn't include rivers of blood and ludicrous gibs? Colour me surprised. A lot of the descriptions are fairly ordinary and there isn't much gore here. Although the plot is ordinary at best, Schmidt created an interesting group of villains in the Drakovich family: papa Yuri and his sons, Gregor and Vlad. The dynamic between them made for some great reading, even if Vlad - the story's main villain - is the weakest of the three. Unlike most of Schmidt's villains, they aren't wacky-ass psychopaths and actually have some personality, or as much as villains in the series are allowed to have. Like all of Schmidt's yarns, the story is wall-to-wall action but unfortunately it really starts to taper off during the warehouse raid near the end. It was like Schmidt lost interest or ran out of steam. This has the odd effect of the brothers being killed off in the most anticlimactic fashion: Gregor is killed during said warehouse duel, although it's never stated if Bolan killed him or if a stray shot from Vlad's gun was the culprit, and then Vlad gets offed at the very end while trying to use a child as a hostage. The kicker? Yuri not only made Bolan work his ass off to kill him during their gunfight, but managed to survive getting smoked by a fucking grenade. Honestly, the book would have been a 9 if it ended there. The storyline has been done before and Schmidt doesn't try to make it interesting, which is disappointing because he came up with some great ideas in the past. The scenes with the Saudi prince weren't all that exciting and bogged things down, but his death at the hands of his own Russian mercenary was a nice twist. Crimson Tide had a similar problem, where a subplot was introduced but not given any room to develop. In this case, the Saudi prince's dealings with the Drakoviches and why he wants to blow up a couple of cities is never explained to the reader. I wouldn't say this is essential reading, but if you like villains with personality then this is a good choice.

Wow, there're so few reviews for books after #410. Is the guy on the cover so off-putting that customers are driven away just from seeing him? Anyway... I'm not really sure how to review Slayground (that pun is bad and you should feel bad, Andy), since I didn't like it nor hate it. How was the action? It's OK. The plot? It's OK. The bad guys? The damsel in distress? The head of the Griffintown newspaper? They're all okay. The book's just okay. Nothing special. Admittedly I had high hopes for this one after reading Silent Threat; both novels feature cults and Bolan doesn't go up against those very often. But while Iron Thunder were a very real and not-really-silent threat, the one here is just... boring as shit, to be honest. But considering the senator's daughter won't fork over any government secrets - it's kinda hard for her to do so when she doesn't know or have any - they wind up sitting around with their thumbs up their asses. None of the villains are killed by Bolan or in an interesting way, although this is more a search-and-rescue mission than a search-and-destroy one. There are a couple cool scenes here, however. The cultists getting high from licking frogs was something different, as were Bolan's war hallucinations after being poisoned from one of the compound's traps. The appearance of Able Team at the end was also a nice touch. All those things give it an above average rating, although Silent Threat is a better cult story than this one.

Chet Cunningham's third effort in the Executioner series is much better than his previous two, Orbiting Omega and Hellbinder. Bolan and his kid brother Johnny are pitted against the Portland mafia, who run a loan sharking operation as well as an illegal arms smuggling ring. It's a bloody campaign indeed that starts with a victim of the loan sharks being forced into prostitution and immediately throwing herself from an 11th story window. The adventure takes Bolan to some interesting locales, such as an amusement park, the Bonneville Dam and to the torture chamber used by one of the supporting villains, where the scene on the cover takes place. That's a really badass cover, by the way. I gotta get a print/poster of it if one ever becomes available. Throw in some jungle combat and you get a short but extremely fun and engaging book. The short story at the end is a flashback to Bolan's 'Nam days, where he uncovers an insidious heroin smuggling operation. A nice little add-on, but I'm not sure why this wasn't incorporated into the story proper. My main gripe with the book is its choppy pace. I'm not sure if the editor was drunk when going through it or if Cunningham just had a really off day, but there's a lot of abrupt scene changes with no sense of time. Bolan says he's going to do this or that and the next paragraph he's here or there. It's extremely awkward but doesn't detract from the book too much.

Guess I'm the odd man out here: I found the book to be ordinary at best. Bolan's tasked with protecting an Iranian exile but of course nothing is what it seems once he arrives at the guy's mansion. After an unsatisfying rescue scene involving Nazarour's wife, Bolan spends some time getting to know the general's staff and associates. Surprise, surprise, he doesn't really like any of them! And herein lies one of the biggest issues with The Iranian Hit: aside from Carol Nazarour and the general's brother - who could be removed from the story entirely and nothing would change - nobody shows any appreciation for Bolan's presence or his efforts and teeter from indifference to outright hostility. Wow! I totally want these assholes to live after their introductory chapter. The story's biggest issue? I'm glad you asked! Here's a spoiler space. The general gets killed off at the very end of the story. Not by the assassins, no, that would make sense. His escape plane is shot down by Grimaldi off-screen (well, off-page I guess) on Bolan's orders. It makes sense in context, but... what was the point of going through all that effort to protect the guy? Bolan already hated him and had no reason to actually agree to protect him because of who and what he is. This was just completely idiotic. I don't know. If anyone aside from Carol was likable then the book would've improved drastically. It's not bad or anything, but nothing really jumped out at me aside from the final battle, which was exciting stuff and had some rocket launcher shenanigans for good measure.

After 237 campaigns against mafiosi and terrorists, Bolan goes up against a new (at the time) enemy: Pirates! Bolan's in the Caribbean here, catching some sun and bullets as he battles Sanitago Crowe, a ruthless scourge who steals from the rich on their cruise ships and holds them for ransom. After countless previous books about bad guys who try and take over the world, it was nice to see a villain with a plausible modus operandi. While I agree that the toxic waste subplot was unnecessary, it didn't really detract from the excitement but does show why the series was better off at staying around the ~190 page mark. If this was one of the 250 page entries, then the toxic waste plotline might've worked better and had more time to be fleshed out. Even with this pointless subplot, the book flows extremely well. From the opening shootout, to the climactic duel against Crowe, the speedboat chase with a little bit of rocket launcher mayhem to boot, Crimson Tide makes for a great read.

Mack Bolan's back in Miami to dismantle the growing alliance between the local mafia and Cuban exiles who fled from the Castro regime. When I got to the part early on where Bolan says he's going to go around rattling cages, I automatically assumed this would be a copy-and-paste adventure from Newton (I buy the books used and read them as they are in stacks on my dresser, trilogies notwithstanding. Sue me). But I was pleasantly surprised. There's lots to like in this one: plenty of well-written action scenes, a striking similarity to Don Pendleton's prose, and a diverse and interesting cast. Usually a cast this large leaves plenty of undeveloped villains and side characters, but everyone manages to carry their own weight here. Toro is the biggest standout, being a nice counterpart for Bolan fighting a similar kind of war everlasting to the big guy's. As has been said by previous reviewers, there are a lot of references to Miami Massacre and there's also a quick nod to Paramilitary Plot. Throw in Bolan's old Omega disguise and him dropping marksman medals at the scenes of his hits, and you have a book that even someone who stopped reading after #38: Satan's Sabbath would enjoy. The plot itself is nothing new, sure, but it's still an entertaining read from start to finish. The only real problem I have is that Toro does not get to kill the guy that sold him out. But other than that, this book kicks ass.

This review contains spoilers, although the book isn't all that good in the first place. The duel on the cover happens on pages 172-173. There, I just saved you 171 pages of mediocrity. And 16 pages of a pointlessly long ending. I only picked this one up because the cover was nice, so in that regard I'm not disappointed. The premise is pretty interesting, if a little more suited to James Bond, and Dr. Dunning is certainly likable as a villain (even though he's not the true villain) and you can't help but root for him. So there's that. But it fucks up in a way similar to Cambodia Clash: by having Bolan work with someone who is, for all intents and purposes, the enemy. Like in Cambodia Clash, they have the same end game, and while Bolan's done this kind of thing before and since, it just doesn't work here. At the time, Bolan's archenemy was the KGB after what happened in Day of Mourning. Yet not only does Bolan team up with a female agent, he boinks her too. Uh-huh. Did nobody at Gold Eagle pull Mr. Cunningham aside and say, "Hey, you might wanna read Day of Mourning to find out why this is a stupid idea?" About midway through, Cunningham stops caring. Dunning is described as a through-and-through pacifist, but once he gets control of the MIRVs he decides to start blowing shit up unless his demands are met. I expected something similar to the film The Rock in this regard, where it turns out to be a bluff and he backs off when he's called out. But no, our pacifistic scientist is totally willing to go through with it. When Yamaguchi becomes the true villain near the end, it would've made sense then, but Dunning's sudden shift into astro-terrorism happens long before then. We do get some cool action scenes at least, like the knife fight on the cover, the opening blitz on the farmhouse and some skirmishes in mountain forests. But by far the best scenes involve Bolan shooting the breeze with the locals in the small town. They were funny and a nice change of pace from the blandness of the book. Skip it.

What a blunder. Bolan teaming up with the Khmer Rouge? Are you for real? Under a more competent author like Newton or Mertz this concept might've worked, but Tom Jagninski (literally who?) totally blew it. Far as I can tell, he was trying to have Bolan team up with the lesser of 5,000 evils...and fucks it all up right off the bat when Eng has a traitor killed, along with his family. She and Bolan are teammates, in case you haven't read this one yet. Bolan later kills the wife of the KGB representative in Cambodia because reasons. Our hero, ladies and gentlemen! The book also seems to be really unfocused. It has about two million villains, none of them lasting any longer than the chapters they're introduced in. So we get a big body count at least. Bolan and Eng hop around from location to location, getting into shootouts but not really getting anything done and it's not until the last 50 pages or so that the plot actually starts to move forward. The book also can't decide what it wants the climax to be. There's the attack on the mine, followed by the tank scene on the cover (which proved to be underwhelming), and finally a half-assed helicopter chase against enemy faction #9,001. One thing I'll give the book credit for is that it doesn't exactly have a happy ending. The POWs get to go home but are sworn to secrecy over their imprisonment, since the US government didn't want to pay their 50 billion dollar ransom. It's a real sucker-punch after what Bolan went through the rescue them, actually. There was an important story arc happening in the series at the time, and while it's obvious he knew about it, it doesn't look like Jagninski gave a shit. A shame, really. The following book, Orbiting Omega, suffered a similar problem.

A decent installment, but not much else. Actually, it makes a better tourist guide than a novel, what with the luscious detail given to Rome and its landmarks. The story here is really thin. Thinner than the pages it's printed on. There's more chaff than wheat here: previous, shorter installments like #46: Bloodsport and #55: Paradine's Gauntlet, with their huge margins and text, manage to carry significantly more substance in one paragraph than a typical page of Assault on Rome. We get lots of scenery porn here, which is nice and immersive, but the book tends to get lost in it. While the scenery is interesting enough, the pages wasted on describing each character's thoughts and feelings isn't, and for whatever reason it just. Keeps. Going. The story is incredibly basic - Bolan infiltrates a terrorist group and destroys them from the inside - but something so simple becomes a chore to read. But when you aren't skipping these long, aimless passages, other problems appear. Bolan is extremely out of character and lets our big bad, Frenzi, blow up a fountain without doing anything to stop him. I get that he has to maintain the part as a mercenary, but this is bullshit. If Bolan had chosen that moment to reveal his ruse, then there's no doubt in my mind the story would've gone into a much more exciting direction. Maybe some cat-and-mouse stuff with bombs and Frenzi's goons. On the plus side, the action scenes are equally long as the pointless inner monologues that bog the story down and provide a sense of balance in that regard. The character's are pretty well developed, especially Claudia Perrini, and I actually liked Frenzi in all his homicidal glory. It's really unfortunate that Claudia's father Luciano, a police chief, doesn't get in on the action at all despite the book hyping it up. Again, if Bolan had stopped LARPing as and evil one-man A-Team during the fountain scene, he and Luciano could've joined forces and obliterated the terrorists together. That would've been cool as hell. Not recommended reading, but not bad either.

If War Against the Mafia is the Citizen Kane of the Executioner series, then Tiger Stalk is surely its Manos: The Hands of Fate. Building off what Ice_Cracked said, this book is actually hilarious if you imagine that Bolan's been replaced by Peter Sellers or Leslie Nielsen. At least then Bolan's incompetence makes sense and you'll know why you're laughing. He bumbles around from place to place, just happening to stumble upon something to move the plot forward. It's very Naked Gun-esque and you actually wonder why this idiot is allowed to use a gun. Honestly, I would put more faith in the main villain Thamby to keep me alive. The plot isn't really that bad - Bolan's off to Sri Lanka to rescue a guy and stop a weapon's auction - but everything else is. None of the villains outside Thamby have any personality and during conversations I can't tell who's supposed to be who. Bolan's first obligatory woman sidekick turns out to be evil and gets killed midway through and is replaced by... someone who's essentially the same, but heroic. Uh-huh. Thamby also knows that by inviting so many factions to his hideout for the weapons auction is not going to end well, but does it anyway and of course manages to escape when Bolan confronts him when the shooting starts. This serves no purpose other than to have a one-on-one and underwhelming struggle between the two at the end. There's only one good scene in the book: Bolan fights random mook #4,324,659 and kills him with something called a "kung fu heart thrust," in which he taps his foe's left breast and instantly kills him. But upon Googling such a phrase, I received absolutely no relevant results. It's incredibly stupid the only time the book seems self aware. Avoid this one.

This book is one of the most brutal entries in the series. When I first got into the Executioner series, this was one of the first titles I read and have yet to read another like it. It baffles me that after this book, Dan Schmidt's later novels had all the depth of a pancake. But this sure as hell isn't a fluke. No, it's essential reading. It starts out a pretty typical Executioner novel, with a Bolan Blitz(TM) on a drug baron's hideout, but the second half plays out like a horror novel. Uncompromising descriptions of human suffering make up a fair portion of the book and the villains' disregard for human life is abhorrent. I don't think any villain in the series has been as dark as Kam Chek, a little Oriental man who speaks French and wields a samurai sword and has a droopy moustache. He's terrifying, although the way he punctuates his sentences with random "Oui"'s and "Si tu plait"'s is funny as hell. The scenes at the opium fields are as grim as you'd expect them to be, and as entertaining as Kam Chek is, you will grow to hate him and Tourquemandan as much as Bolan, Grimaldi and company do. Schmidt did an amazing job portraying everyone's desperation and resolve to keep going even though their country has abandoned them. The final battle is excellent reading, although I would have preferred more of a one-on-one fight against Bolan and Kam Chek. Aw, well. Go track this one down if you haven't read it already. You won't regret it.

I imagine that if you took a look at Mike Newton's Amazon order history, you would find dozens and dozens of orders for CTRL, C and V keys. And if you looked at the keyboard itself, the others would be covered in dust. This is just another half-assed effort by someone who stopped caring long ago, and is now content to release the same book over and over again. All the Newton tropes are there: the damsel in distress, the sniper scene, the rattling of cages, and the bad taste left in the reader's mouth when they realize they've already read this same story countless times. Not even having Mack team up with his brother Johnny is enough to give it more than an average rating. Vinnie Gallo is wholly unremarkable among the series' villains, pretty much content to sit around and do fuck-all while his empire goes down in flames. Strauss and Kelly were actually decent side-villains, being corrupt cops who have the audacity to take a holier-than-thou stance with anyone who looks at them funny. It's a shame the detective Mahan character was introduced so late, because he knows there's something sinister going on in his department but we only see him a few times, generally briefly, after his introduction scene at the book's midway point. Then we have the rest of the villains, a cast of... how many? Who cares, they're even more bland than Gallo and serve no purpose than to increase the body count. The plot itself has been done countless times before, but considering this is the nine-hundred-and-fifty-three-quadrillionth book in the series it's hard to create something truly original. But somehow Newton just manages to make it even more dull without even trying. Name power must be a hell of a thing if he's still cranking them out despite his current reception. He comes so close to creating an actual conflict with Johnny's mistakenly killing a cop, but it's lazily handwaved away at the end because whoops we're at the 192nd page and it's time to wrap it up. Five stars solely because Mack and Johnny team up.