Rating: WARTY!
I'm glad they added "A novel"! to the front cover of this. I was ready to believe it was an authentic historical, if not hysterical, document! Some years ago I read several of Andy McDermott's Eddie Chase/Nina Wilde cheap-thrill franchise. I soon grew tired of them because each was more improbable than the last, and every novel was pretty much exactly the same. The only thing which really changed was the myth being exploited. I never did review any of them, so when I saw his latest one (published in 2014) on clearance sale at the local library for just a dollar, I decided this was a good time to revisit and review. I have to say the news isn't good.
This novel is some five hundred pages, but it would have been half that length had it not been for a tedious, extended, interleaved flashback to Eddie Chase's time in Vietnam as a hostage-rescuing mercenary. That was so amateurish and boring that I quit reading those and simply skipped them to get back to the contemporary action which it turned out, wasn't much better. Instead of wasting your time on that tedious detour, you can wait until the beginning of chapter twenty three where the entire thing is summarized in a paragraph.
Eight years ago, Eddie was a mercenary tramping through the Vietnamese jungle at night in a raging storm. He and his group were approaching known hostiles and yet when they hear a noise, the author tells us they "drew their guns". They're carrying rifles! You don't draw rifles, and in hostile territory these trained and seasoned mercenaries didn't have their guns at the ready at all times? It's nonsensical!
Contemporary descriptions aren't any better. At one point the author seems to be confused between a JetRanger (aka a Bell 206) and a "Eurocopter" (by which I assume he means something like the European Heavy Lift Helicopter, but this isn't going to be available for another two or three years!). The JetRanger is a light observation helicopter which isn't going to be airlifting a granite obelisk. Eurocopter as a corporation doesn't exist and hasn't done so since the beginning of 2014. I guess the author didn't recheck this before he published, but Eurocopter isn't the name of a model, it was the name of the corporation (now Airbus).
The contemporary story moved at a fair clip, but it was the standard story: Eddie and Nina are all lovey-dovey. Something suddenly comes up out of the blue, and they're plunged into a mystery. One person is kidnapped or a kidnap is attempted and Eddie foils it. There is a deadly car chase through public streets wreaking havoc. Eddie is part of it and not only escapes unscathed, there is never, ever, ever any penalty for him to pay with the local authorities.
Not only did the authorities drop all charges, but also the hotel through which he drove a vehicle didn't pursue any civil case against him! It was completely absurd. This is the kind of story children write. It's the kind of story you end up with when you write it as a B-movie screenplay instead of a coherent, intelligent thriller. So what if he had diplomatic immunity from prosecution (although how that works is a mystery)? They can expel diplomats, yet nothing happens to Eddie. Ever.
Despite knowing that killers are looking for this obelisk, they go out to Norway to unearth it from the bed of a lake where it was buried when the dam was built. They take absolutely no precautions whatsoever to provide for security; thus the obelisk is stolen. These people are morons. It's at this point that Nina learns that Eddie has outright lied to her and sought to undermine the expedition, and even destroy the obelisk they seek. When she grills him about it, all he will tell her is that he made a promise and he can't tell her what it's all about., but a short time later, Nina learns that Eddie has known what was on the obelisk all along. Why didn't he tell her? he forgot that he knew - yeah, forgot until ti was a convenient ruse for the author to get them all back on a trail that has gone cold. This is writing at it's most amateurish and pathetic./p>
It's at this precise point that she should ditch him. He's betrayed her and worse, he's actively been working to undermine everything she was striving for risking her life, but of course she doesn't exact any price, and Eddie gets off scot-free again. He could quite simply have told Nina what his conflict was without necessarily going into any of the supposedly secret details, yet he sought to deceive her rather than come clean, adhering to a promise he made a decade ago, rather than to the promise he made to her when he married her. It's clear where his priorities lie. Dump the jerk, Nina; you deserve better. She's an idiot if she ever trusts him again after this. He has no excuse whatsoever for behaving the way he did, showing clearly that his loyalty is not to Nina at all.
It was at this point that I decided I'd read enough of this nonsense, and fully realized what a smart decision I'd made all that time ago to quit reading this amateur trash and find something better.
