The Red Horseman

Rating:
Summary: The whole enchilada!!
Review: My absolute favorite of the Jake Grafton Series. Grafton is at his most dangerous, compared to the other Grafton Novels . There are enough twists and turns on the ground and in the air to make the book hard to put down.The chapter with the the
SU-25's, kicks things into overdrive. I would love to see a movie made of this one!

Rating:
Summary: I knew you had it in you!
Review: Stephen Coonts has really evolved with this novel. He has progressed from the plain men-in-war type thriller(Flight of the Intruder) to the true techno-thriller. This book ranks up there with books like Larry Bond's Red Phoenix and Tom Clancy's The Sum of All Fears. I usually don't like novels with real people in them(Boris Yeltsin and Saddam Hussein), but the Red Horseman does not exploit these people like some others(David Hagberg's Kilo Option, for example). This book kept me awake at night because it's so realistic. I'm glad Mr. Coonts has gone on to write other techno-thrillers as well(Fortunes of War). Congratulations, Mr. Coonts! I knew you could do it!

Rating:
Summary: This one deserves 200 STARS!
Review: Stephen Coonts's very best so far! A well-researched, fast-paced and easy-to-read thriller which deals with the story of a nuclear power plant explosion, caused by a renegade general intent on using the disaster to gain him access to a tactical nuclear weapons storage depot, to sell them to Saddam Hussein. Meanwhile, members of the CIA are dropping down like flies in a binary poisoning plot which claims the life of a British newspaper tycoon(a thinly fictionalised Robert Maxwell) and could have been lifted from THE X-FILES. The flying sequences are as ever, as brilliant as Dale Brown with all the autheticity and fully-explained technics you could want, and it's interesting to see Jake Grafton handle Russian fighters for a change! The final scenes in Saudi Arabia and Iraq provide an excellent backdrop to the mission to retrieve the stolen warheads, and the Moscow scenes are also authentic and well-researched. Once again, like Tom Clancy's CARDINAL OF THE KREMLIN, it brought back memories of my visit there. Well done Stephen Coonts, and an ideal starting point for those new to this excellent author's work!

Rating:
Summary: Stephen Coonts flying high at a low altitude
Review: The high point of "The Red Horseman" is the aerial dogfight between Jake Grafton (flying a Russian Su-25 "Frogfoot") and four Russian Su-27 "Flankers", with most of the action taking place below 200 ft. altitude! Stephen Coonts is very good at writing about this kind of combat, and you really feel that you're right there in the cockpit with Jake.

This book is the fifth or sixth (depending on how you number them) book in the Jake Grafton series. By now Stephen Coonts had established himself as a worthy competitor to Tom Clancy, and in my opinion his books are better than Clancy's. In particular, the characters in a Stephen Coonts book are real people, and people you enjoy learning more and more about.

In the first two-thirds of "The Red Horseman" the story unfolds slowly, but satisfactorily, as an international political thriller. Jake, now a Rear Admiral in the American Defense Intelligence Agency, is sent to Moscow to help monitor the Russian dismantling of their nuclear warheads. The CIA is also involved, but not in the way we would expect, and of course some warheads go missing.

The last third of the book becomes a techno-thriller. The hunt is on to retrieve the missing warheads and to ensure that no more will be stolen. In addition to the great dogfight mentioned above there is a very detailed description of how a major military operation to secure an enemy airfield would be done nowadays.

I found this last section of the book to be the most interesting and exciting part. The whole thing is rather unrealistic, but the reader is willing to ignore that because it's so exciting. Unfortunately, I thought that the ending was a bit too far out, and this is part of the reason for the lack of the fifth star.

Also on the negative side, I found Stephen Coonts opinion of post-glasnost Russia overly derogatory. He has his characters saying "nothing works here" and "Russia is on its way to the stone age" so many times it becomes silly. This is especially true with the hindsight we have now that Russia did survive the Yeltsin era and is slowly but surely becoming a developed country by western standards.

A very interesting sub-plot in "The Red Horseman" involves the death of a British newspaper mogul named Nigel Keren. Stephen Coonts has very clearly modeled Nigel Keren on the real-life Robert Maxwell. Even their dates of death are identical!

In conclusion, a very good techno-thriller, up to the usual Stephen Coonts standards. If you like military techno-thrillers with lots of political skullduggery, then this is for you.

Rennie Petersen

Rating:
Summary: The Red Horseman
Review: The Red Horseman finds regular Coonts character Jake Grafton, now working for the DIA, traveling to the post Cold War Russia to prevent their nuclear weapons from turning up in places like the Middle East, struggling against CIA and KGB operatives along the way. The appearences of two world leaders adds a certain realism to the story. The story itself is rather complicated but does not seem that way with Coonts's style of writing. The flying scenes were wonderfully described, as usual, and the book also includes a particularly well written combat scene with special forces near the end. This is one of the better and more original novels to revolve around Russia after communism and the Cold War, a much too overused subject in many military and political thrillers. This may be Coonts's best book.

Rating:
Summary: Now that's some good Coonts!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Review: The Red Horseman was VERY good. What else can I say? It even puts Grafton back in the cockpit for a chapter (but in a RUSSIAN plane!) where he belongs. I liked the way he portrayed real-world political figures (i.e. Yeltsin, Hussein and Clinton) and used some apparent expertise on Russia to create an excellant storyline. I can't wait until I read The Intruders

Rating:
Summary: What great story.
Review: These are great books. I read most of them in the Gulf War and was addicted to the plots of the A6 intruder. I am in Korea and still continue to read the books. The last one I read was the Intruders. I loved it. It brought back memories of the days I grew up at whidbey island NAS. My Dad was a AMHC in the squadrans you mostly talked about. It really hit home, Thanks.

Rating:
Summary: Good Book, great fun
Review: This is a good book to read, the plot is ok, the thing that i dont like is that Jake Grafton in this book is almost like a superman, he can fly planes, well ok, but jumping with seals without like he was one for years is not very much real, and handle a squad of SU 27 Flankers with a single Su-25 frogfoot is almost impossible to happen .. i think this is the major faults in the book, the rest is ok .. one of the most improved chracters in this book is Jack Yocke, overall this book is very good to read and the history is well written

Rating:
Summary: Don't bother unless you need an excuse to avoid a root canal
Review: Whatta joke! I struggled to finish this mind-boggling farce thinking it might finally get better. Nope. Coonts not only avoids any serious character development in this made-for-TV gag, but also blissfully skips over any research into the nature of the people in the jobs he writes about. This lends nothing but a total lack of credibility in what these characters can accomplish, given their backgrounds and their government positions. But that's ok with the author-- his bureaucratic James Bonds just go right ahead and pull off the most outlandish bizarre stunts anyway. You won't have any trouble putting it down. I just did.

Rating:
Summary: Don't bother unless you need an excuse to avoid a root canal
Review: Whatta joke! I struggled to finish this mind-boggling farce thinking it might finally get better. Nope. Coonts not only avoids any serious character development in this made-for-TV gag, but also blissfully skips over any research into the nature of the people in the jobs he writes about. This lends nothing but a total lack of credibility in what these characters can accomplish, given their backgrounds and their government positions. But that's ok with the author-- his bureaucratic James Bonds just go right ahead and pull off the most outlandish bizarre stunts anyway. You won't have any trouble putting it down. I just did.