Force Protection

Rating:
Summary: Taut suspense - till the last three pages.
Review: I'd dearly love to give this novel five stars. Four hundred of its 403 pages are a pure delight. Taut, gut-wrenching, can't put it down thriller. The last three pages, unfortunately, take a lot of the wind out of the sails. They don't ruin the experience: just kind of diminish it.

Alan Craik finds himself in Kenya, sneaking a gun through customs while his colleague, a female special Navy Criminal Investigation agent blows through customs carrying drugs. A naval vessel making a port call is bombed and Craik is very much in the middle of things.

Kent is a superb writer; no doubt about that. He relentlessly builds the tension as the tentacles of an international plot envelop his wife, an astronaut in training in Houston and a Carrier Battle Group.

There are no flaws in the characters. The good guys and gals are good: humans, not super-heroes. Sometimes they catch a lucky break or think their ways through a dicey situation. Sometimes things don't work out and they wind up very dead. Above all, they are believable. You suck in your breath when they're in a tight spot - and there are lots of tight spots.

The bad guys are believably evil- and you hope they'll all suffer for their evil ways.

The plotting is just plain great. Nothing unbelievable, no jars that make you swallow your credulity. Except for the last three pages. I don't know if Kent needed to keep some characters alive for another book (many of the characters have appeared in his other novels) or if an editor slipped or what. But the last three pages just don't fit with the rest of the story.

But that shouldn't stop you from reading it, if you're a lover of thrillers. Like I said, this a five-star story. The only reason I knocked it down is because of the last three pages. Still a very enjoyable read.

Jerry

Rating:
Summary: Great Read
Review: Although this book was obviously written by a former naval aviator, people who are (sometimes) affectionately known as Airdales, since no one in the "real navy" would ever call a ship a "boat", this was a fun read.

I'm not competent to discuss the book's literary merits so I'll only say it had a logical and fast paced narrative and was hard to put down. The frequent switch of focus from Houston to Mombassa to Washington, etc., took a bit of getting used to but became less noticeable as the story progressed.

Note to Airdales: a boat is a vessel carried on a ship (except for submarines but that's another story).