War Wagon Wanda

I guess I'm in the minority here, but as cool as all the sniper storylines were in this title, it felt to me liike they came at the expense of giving more time to Mack, who's supposed to be the central character in these books, right? Here it was more like Bolan was a special guest star and it bothered me. Great writing, though, and a far better effort than most of the recent books in this series that I've read. I just think making this the top-rated of all Executioner books is a bit much. Some of the old classics were better, at least as far as I'm concerned.

I remembered a book with 'Slaughter' in the title being the top-ranked on on this website and bought 'Slaughter House' by mistake, but I was glad I did because this was the best of the newer books I've read. The plot with the Triads and the whole tsunami trash haul scam was great and there are some really original villians. My favorite is the ex-wrestler who is now a whorehouse bouncer with big dreams. There are plenty of great shoot-em up/action scenes and a lot of good dialogue exchanges. I would have given this a ten except there are some places where it almost felt like some pages were missing or something. The time it bugged me the most was when this woman bounty runs into Bolan just before the book's biggest shootout and she acts like she knows him and was expecting him, only it was never explained. And after she gets killed, Mack gets all mopey and swears vengeance like it was April Rose who died or at least somebody he knew. I don't know, maybe I missed something or maybe this woman worked with Mack in another Executioner book and so they didn't think we needed to be reminded. But on the whole, this was a great book and except for the bounty hunter stuff, I really liked the way everything tied together by the last chapter. And if they would have figured a way to have Bolan wind up driving around in an updated version of the War Wagon, I would have given this an eleven.

This was a big improvement over the last two recent books I read in this series. Much better writing, more developed characters, and some nice plot twists. There were a few spots where I thought the writer dropped the ball -- like another reviewer said, that scene where Bolan leaves his war bag in his car where kids might get to it -- but at least I had the sense that an effort was being made to write a decent book with some originality. I liked the cover, too, even if this guy still doesn't look like Bolan's supposed to. I'll keep trying to get back into the series in hopes that more books are written like this one instead of the other clunkers I read.

This whole thing read like the writer pulled out an unfinished book about a hostage crisis in Spain from their desk and decided to finish it by sandwiching in a few Bolan scenes and passing it off as an Executioner novel. The writing itself was okay, nothing special, but I couldn't get into the story because Bolan wasn't really driving things. It seemed like all the other stuff was the main focus and Bolan was just there for a cameo appearance like the way Marlon Brando wound up in a lot of crappy movies at the end of his career. Hello? If you're going to call it an Executioner novel, make sure it's about the Executioner and don't have him just play second fiddle to all the bad guys and victims and government agents. And I agree with whoever complained about the cover. This dweeb they're passing off as Bolan on the covers these days looks more like some dumb hunk from the OC. Am I just crazy or wasn't Bolan supposed to be dark-haired with deep blue eyes and a world-weary look about him? It's like the publishers or editors don't even care if they get things right any more. Or am I just being too nostalgic, because when I was reading these books twnenty years ago, they rocked. Or maybe it's even further back. Maybe things really started to go wrong when they got rid of the War Wagon...

I came back to the wild world of Mack Bolan after a long, long absence when somebody left this at the airport in Atlanta. I could tell right off that whoever left the book didn't finish it, and a few chapters in I could see why. There's nothing special to this book and a lot of it was very been-there-done-that. In fact, I'm not positive, but some of the scenes seemed so familiar I'm wondering if they were just copied out of one of the earlier Executioner novels I read yeas ago. At any rate, if you've been living in a cave and never read a novel about neo-Nazis and secret weapons, this might be an okay introduction to Bolan, because at least the writer presents Mack in a way that reminded me of the way Don Pendleton wrote him. Everybody else should move on. I might try another book or two, but if they're all this mediocre that'll do it for me. And they should bring back the War Wagon!