Anonymous

it's a romance novel

Reviewed: 01-21-25

Sure, there's lots of action and impossible escapes and interesting battles and exotic settings . . . but much of that is laughably impossible, though the hero often loses (yet somehow emerges victorious), but all in all, it's a romance novel, with multiple beautiful women all in love (or maybe not) with the hero who is in love with all of them (or maybe not), or else they're planning to murder him (or maybe not).

Enough of these things. On to something better. I'm disappointed in the ghost writer, who is capable of so much more.

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1 person found this helpful

unreasonably ridiculous

Reviewed: 04-04-24

The book started out derivative, quickly descended into highly unlikely, paused briefly before plummeting into absurd, never even approaching sublime before landing firmly in ridiculous.

The author can clearly write, perhaps, however, as a result of copying whole books written by someone else almost page by page, then changing things around enough to claim actual authorship. It brings to mind that old famous review, 'this book is both good and original. Unfortunately, the good parts are not original, and the original parts are not good.' I forget who is credited with that, but it fits.

What isn't copied is endlessly clichéd, from the size of the woman cop's attributes to the venality of the local constabulary. The book appears to have been created by and/or for teen boys whose mental and moral development stalled circa 1957.

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people whine about this book for the wrong reasons

Reviewed: 09-17-23

People are pretty offended by the premise and the all-women team and the horror of accusations against the military . . . but those are predictable, knee-jerk, self-identifying ressentiments from the usual suspects: who cares?

I enjoyed the book; even though I'm not really a Patterson fan, he and his co-author know how to write a page-turner, and the cast did a nice job of dramatizing the words. The sound effects aren't overdone, but in fact enhance the listen.

My only real objection is that the writers seem to never have been to Fort Irwin, or the Mojave desert for that matter. Ft. Irwin is an amazingly peculiar place, surrounded by a unique area. The uniqueness is in large part based on how little there is out there, hence how unusual the things that are there are. Barstow was never mentioned, nor Calico; the drive to Nevada took no time at all, and at one point there was reference to 'near the base,' a place that doesn't exist: nothing out there is close to anything else at all.

And the base is not just desert in all directions, as represented There are popup Afghan towns all over the place; there are giant Quonset huts with drones flying from them. There are feral burros and a shark fin in a playa. The base itself is like a miniature downtown USA: it's damned peculiar and worth mentioning. There was no mention of range, and being downrange: you can't just travel freely wherever you want, not without finding out who is where and what's going on.

I could go on and on, but the point is: setting is more than just a painted backdrop for the story. The desert is a lot more than just 'hot' or 'sandy.'

Authors need to visit the places they write about . . .

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I would read another

Reviewed: 05-11-23

It’s a novel concept with some engaging characters and a variety of twists and turns

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What a waste

Reviewed: 12-10-22

Eisler used to be good. Now it’s just way too many dumb words, predictable plot, gratuitous sex and a plodding plot rendered with countless wasted words

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4 people found this helpful

ponderous, yet plodding

Reviewed: 01-10-21

Such a mass of uninteresting details of uninspiring events told in a matter-of-fact manner and read by a man in a monotone, this book should be good for putting a listener to sleep, but the banality of it is so insipid as to be irritating as the prose moves haltingly through the most commonplace events and descriptions (the skull is hard and meant to shield the brain from hard blows, but the bullet, a point three eight, did not respect this idea).

Spare me from this tedium.

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this weird genre

Reviewed: 01-09-21

There are so many books like this one being churned out nowadays; the reviews always mention Reacher or Rapp or other lone wolf righter of wrongs, and yes, this is yet another effort to create a one-man-wrecking-ball hero on a noble of unasked-for quest . . . but like so many other pale imitations of an idea that has long since been run into the ground, this one fails on every imaginable level.
The stiff, childish prose is only accentuated y the reader who has only one cadence: five words together, followed by a pause, regardless of punctuation, like a small dog panting over small exertions.
And of course our hero must be attractive to the fairer sex, but of course not a cad or a heel. No, he has refined tastes, selecting the not-skinny young woman in the herd of friends cruising for men, and of course he treats the not-skinny woman with all the reverence normally reserved for some Arthurian romance.
So I could of course go on, but why would anyone read any farther This book follows a pattern of such things, kind of a bridge between an Xtian romance and a sordid thriller, I suppose . . . representing a reality so at odds with real life as to constitute a fantasy, but a peculiarly sterile one, creating a world that is supposed to be threatening enough to require a hit-man, but a world (and hitman) operating on such a level of saccharine inoffensiveness as to be not worth saving.

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hero fantasy

Reviewed: 11-29-20

This starts out with plenty of action and firepower and narrow escapes and car chases and highly unlikely motivation, and rapidly descends into bathos, or whatever the word is for a knight-errant fantasy wish fulfillment tale is. Wherever our intrepid hero goes, the weak are being molested by the venal yet strong, and he manages to rescue numerous damsels in distress daily, sometimes before breakfast. Yt he remains humble, while hinting of a bad upbringing that he's now dedicated to ensuring doesn't happen to anyone else, at least not without intervention by some strong, silent type. He is of course adopted by one of the aforementioned damsels . . .

In short, this goes from the silly to the inane to the just plain stupid fairly quickly. If you're looking for Jack Reacher, he took the last train elsewhere . . .

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4 people found this helpful

a good start, but

Reviewed: 08-17-20

This starts out like the typical Florida-is-ridiculous genre novel, and has some very good one-liners . . . that soon reveal themselves to be all there is to this book, which sounds more like a video game than a plot-driven narrative. Plenty of snark but only loosely related to anything else; much of this could be presented in almost any other order and have about the same amount of impact. Clever, but not smart.

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don't stop now

Reviewed: 08-17-20

I watched the tv shows and the movies, and was pleasantly surprised at how well-wrought and well-read this is. I'm getting more of these.

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