Rating: 
Summary: Highly Disappointing
Review: I bought the book after seeing several people reading it at airports. I thought it would be a good read to pass time while on the plane. I was sadly mistaken.I would have stopped reading the book after the first couple of chapters, but continued reading it till the end as I wanted to give it a fair review. This is my first Stephen Coonts book and I can say that it'll be my last! Coonts has demonstrated that he is a biased and prejudiced author who did not conduct a proper research before writing this book. Any one who has been to Hong Kong and China would know that the Chinese government is not as corrupt and the people not as dissatisfied as Coonts made them out to be. It is this kind of fiction,and I stress FICTION, that breeds distrust and misunderstanding of another government. Coonts even tried to justify his work in the author's note at the end of the story with an account of the use of Hanyu Pinyin as nonsensical because he does not understand the romanised version of the Mandarin dialect. I'll like to point out that even in the English language, many combinations of the alphabets into words do not make sense. Eg. -tion is pronounced as "shion" instead of "tee-on". Peking is only Peking to the Western world, no Chinese dialect or language pronounces it as Peking. In fact, Hong Kong is also not a translation of any Chinese dialect or language. In Cantonese, Hong Kong is pronounced as "Heung Khong". He also claimed that only Northern China speaks mandarin and all of Southern China speaks Cantonese. I'll like to point out to Mr. Coonts that China is a country with over 200 different languages and dialects. It is logical for a country to adopt a national language to ensure better communication. And it is not unreasonable to adopt the dialect of the capital as the main language. Mind you, the written language is the same for most of China, just the reading of it is different based on the region you are in. And Cantonese is only spoken in the province of Guangdong (which incidently the closest to Hong Kong). Taiwan (whether or not you consider it to be part of China) speaks mainly Mandarin and Fujian. Sorry for ranting. But his one-sided view of Asia really got me riled.
Rating:
Summary: Really terrible
Review: I don't know if you need to have read others in the series to appreciate Jake Grafton, but I never warmed to him or his wife or any of his other characters, so I could not have cared less what happens to them. I got no sense at all of living in Hong Kong, and all of the pooitical material seemed like so much nonsense to me. Trying to make the murderer the glamorous guy who single-handedly goes off to start his own civil war to supposedly 'save' Hong Kong from the evil red menace simply offends me. There is nothing glamorous about war except for the profiteers, and there has to be some moral compass even for people who are supposedly defending freedom-going around killing people is the ultimate in tyranny and repression, no matter who is doing it. The conclusion with the robots was easily the most ridiculous thing I have ever read. He may have written other good books, but after reading this one, I think I will skip him and go for a really good fast-action writer like David Alexander.
Rating: 
Summary: Interesting but not his best
Review: I enjoy Grafton novels for the technology. This book was less of technology than of politics. Jake Grafton is taken along events leading up to a revolution in Hong Kong; he is more of a bystander. It's a good story but I wanted more military technology than the Robocop material we were given.
Rating:
Summary: You've kidnapped my wife? How naughty of you!
Review: I found this book rather disappointing, even though it did get quite exciting towards the end with the descriptions of how the rebel forces take on the Chinese Army and manage to take over Hong Kong.
My biggest criticism has to do with the way Jake Grafton responds to the kidnapping of his wife Callie by Hong Kong crime boss Sonny Wong. Jake knows that Sonny has Callie locked up somewhere, is having her tortured, and probably intends to kill her when he gets the information he wants and/or gets the ransom he is demanding.
So what does Jake do? He stages a raid on Sonny's restaurant, shooting a guard dead in the process. Jake then confronts Sonny and finishes up by setting fire to Sonny's restaurant. But does he demand his wife released here and now? No! Jake makes various threats to Sonny about what he'll do if Callie is harmed and then walks away!
I found that action so crazy that I spent most of the rest of the book wondering how Jake could be so dumb as to act like that. As a small redeeming feature even Jake wonders how he was so dumb: 100 pages later he's thinking of himself in the third person and saying, "He had his chance last night. He should have stuck his revolver up Wong's nose and told him he was going to blow his f***ing head off if he didn't produce Callie in a quarter of an hour."
Of course Jake eventually learns where Callie is being held captive and stages another raid in which he manages to free her. But still, how could he have been so dumb (and so uncaring?) to not exploit his first chance to get Callie freed?
I also found it somewhat problematic that the "Sergeant York" fighting robots were so advanced. This book is supposed to be a techno-thriller, but these robots were so intelligent and so powerful that it was more like science fiction.
So far I've read two of Stephen Coonts' books and I do intend to read some more despite my disappointment with this one. But one thought keeps returning to me: how does someone with Jake Grafton's flair for disobeying orders get promoted to the rank of Rear Admiral?
Rennie Petersen
Rating:
Summary: You've kidnapped my wife? How naughty of you!
Review: I found this book rather disappointing, even though it did get quite exciting towards the end with the descriptions of how the rebel forces take on the Chinese Army and manage to take over Hong Kong. My biggest criticism has to do with the way Jake Grafton responds to the kidnapping of his wife Callie by Hong Kong crime boss Sonny Wong. Jake knows that Sonny has Callie locked up somewhere, is having her tortured, and probably intends to kill her when he gets the information he wants and/or gets the ransom he is demanding. So what does Jake do? He stages a raid on Sonny's restaurant, shooting a guard dead in the process. Jake then confronts Sonny and finishes up by setting fire to Sonny's restaurant. But does he demand his wife released here and now? No! Jake makes various threats to Sonny about what he'll do if Callie is harmed and then walks away! I found that action so crazy that I spent most of the rest of the book wondering how Jake could be so dumb as to act like that. As a small redeeming feature even Jake wonders how he was so dumb: 100 pages later he's thinking of himself in the third person and saying, "He had his chance last night. He should have stuck his revolver up Wong's nose and told him he was going to blow his f***ing head off if he didn't produce Callie in a quarter of an hour." Of course Jake eventually learns where Callie is being held captive and stages another raid in which he manages to free her. But still, how could he have been so dumb (and so uncaring?) to not exploit his first chance to get Callie freed? I also found it somewhat problematic that the "Sergeant York" fighting robots were so advanced. This book is supposed to be a techno-thriller, but these robots were so intelligent and so powerful that it was more like science fiction. So far I've read two of Stephen Coonts' books and I do intend to read some more despite my disappointment with this one. But one thought keeps returning to me: how does someone with Jake Grafton's flair for disobeying orders get promoted to the rank of Rear Admiral?
Rating: 
Summary: disappointing
Review: I have read all of Stephen Coonts books, and this was by far my least favorite. I was so disappointed to see how much his writing style had changed from Flight of the Intruder. Coonts has gone from amazing stories with amazing people, to simply a story. In a majority of his previous novels (Flight, Under Seige, Minotaur, and Final Flight) he writes the characters with such compassion, such reality. He makes you believe in this surreal setting of action novels that these "real" people are capable of doing heroic things. But here in Hong Kong that is abandoned. Coonts tries to play off of Jake Graftons popularity, as well as readers familiarity with him. Coonts spends hardly any time building the characters, but rather spends too much time working on the plot. I came out of this book wishing for the old Stephen Coonts. For any fan of him, this book will be disappointing. The only good thing that I can pull from this book is his ability to go into detail regarding politics, etc. In this sense he reminds me of Tom Clancy. But again since this book was so much shorter than those of Clancy's, one would have to assume that the character development was what was left out.
Rating:
Summary: A waste of time and money
Review: I made the mistake of paying perfectly good money for this perfectly bad book. I love to read, and am always reading something. I took this novel with me on a hiking trip. Books are extra weight, so I didn't bring along anything else to read. About one-third of the way through the book, I decided I'd rather just not read anything, than to continue with this lunacy. I have been a fan of Stephen Coonts since Flight of the Intruder, and made the mistake of assuming that he was somewhat interested in continuing to write quality books. This book isn't. I like high tech. This book could have been researched by spending two weeks vacationing in Hong Kong. I like believeable characters. Coonts has lost touch with what real people are like. I like believeable plot. The only thing believeable about this story is that Hong Kong really can be found on a global map. Excuse me if I'm much more careful before spending any more money on another Coonts novel.
Rating:
Summary: a bit too predictable
Review: I saw many of the things in this book too predictable. For instance, when Jake rescues his wife, they made it too easy and I knew that Jake and Carmenelli would get her on the first try. There were other parts in this book that turned me off. For instance, when Coontz calls a man "that dude". I thought that was a bit too vernacular for a narraration. Perhaps if it was used in a dialogue, it would fit better. Yet overall, the story was full of suspense and thrilling.
Rating: 
Summary: Better but not his best
Review: I truly enjoyed this book. After the first 100 or so pages I couldn't put it down. Much better than the prior novel (Cuba). I found the principal characters generally believable. The robots seemed a bit much at first, but then anything is possible. Perhaps something similar does exist for the military. Looking forward to the next story.
Rating:
Summary: Author seems to have fallen for government propagnda himself
Review: I was very disappointed with this book as it seems that ironically Coonts has become the victim of propaganda about China created by the American establishment, and has failed to do any real research of his own, I wonder if he's even visited China. At one point he talks about people from mainland China being surprised by the existence of Cell phones! He might be shocked to know that the cell phone system in China is actually a generation more advanced than the one the US is using, in fact the US is the most backward country for cell phone use in the world. He also talks about people from China being surprised by how modern Hong Kong is and that back on the mainland its all just rice paddies, well Mr. Coonts you obviously haven't visited Shanghai. Coonts also seems to have no grip on student or people sentiment in the SAR, in fact most people are fairly happy to be part of China now, baring Falun Gong cult protests, there have been very few demonstrations in HK since the hand over. And contrary to what Coonts suggests government officials in HK do not have the kind of powers he suggests they do in this book, all in all a very obviously biased, badly researched and out of touch book.
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