Dead Hand

Rating:
Summary: Losing his touch
Review: Dead Hand is an example of what happens when a good author runs out of ideas.

The plot is appealing enough - we Americans LOVE renegade Russian generals - but even that may be starting to wear a little thin. Unfortunately the characters need lots more work, the story line seems to be jumbled collection of disconnected scenarios, and the small unit combat actions - the passages which Harold Coyle has always been so good at - are pretty much absent from the book.

Mr. Coyle's musings on the nature of military leadership are borrowed from Ted Fehrenbach's study of Korea, "This Kind of War" and the description of the meteor strike reminds me a little too much of Niven and Pournelle's "Lucifer's Hammer".

Dead Hand leaves me with the feeling that the book was written in a great rush to meet a contract date. It also leaves me feeling that a good writer has become burnt out.

Rating:
Summary: A Change in Approach
Review: Harold Coyle, VMI graduate and former armor officer in the US Army has written a group of novels that have captured the loyalty of many readers. I am among that group of loyal fans who seek out his books and then devour them as soon as I buy them. For the most part, I have always liked his story lines and the characters he creates. DEAD HAND, is another of those books that I enjoyed, but found flawed by the all too obvious technical errors that are included within the text.

As other reviewers here have noted, Coyle and his editors were delinquent in their fact-checking and this greatly diminished my enjoyment of the story. Continuing to place the SAS Headquarters of Hereford in Scotland is probably the most egregious error. Any soldier or hobbyist who knows anything about the SAS will note that mistake and snicker in derision.

Where Coyle does a great job with this story line is through the use of his imagination in creating a joint and multi-national force to solve the problem that serves as the plotline for the novel.

Basically, Russia, its central government severely weakened by corruption and the huge land mass of the old Soviet Union is faced with a huge dilemma. The first is that the central government must deal with a renegade general in Siberia who is in control and possession of several ICBM locations. While that is bad enough, the old Soviet government had built their missile fields with doomsday systems. Under the assumption that the Soviet government in Moscow might not survive a nuclear exchange with the USA and the UK, they installed "dead hand systems" in their strategic rocket forces. Designed to launch even without human intervention, they would destroy the United States and the West that had prevailed in a nuclear war, probably as the result of a first strike.

What creates the problem for the Russian government, the democracies in the West and for the men who must disarm this system is that the dead hand system works off seismic shocks. Originally engineered to launch as a result of the shocks that occurred as part of nuclear detonations elsewhere in Siberia, the system appears to have been activated as the result of the impact caused by a large meteor that has struck earth.

Knowing about the system and the renegade general has prompted western military planners to create a multi-national force of elite troops to disarm the most dangerous of the missile fields and the general commanding them. At the same time, the Russian government in Moscow has dispatched its own troops to terminate the general's command and return the missile field to government control.

Coyle does a fine job of building and developing each of the characters. He includes several from the 2eme Regiment Etranger Parachutiste (2eme REP), the 22nd SAS Regiment, US Army Special Forces and veterans of SPETSNAZ. These different military organizations ironically share a common mission and Coyle places a great deal of emphasis and descriptive narration on providing the reader with significant details of their planning, the parachute drops, their road marches and so on. In some cases though, the detail overwhelms the progress of the story and only serves to slow down the pacing of the plotline.

Because of his "padding" of details, this book does not read as quickly as Coyle's earlier efforts. In addition, there were sections where I was tempted to give up on the story altogether. I did not and read the novel to completion probably more out of curiosity to see how it ended and which characters survived.

Without giving away the ending, I think readers of this novel will be somewhat surprised by the approach Coyle uses in his final denouement. It is both unusual and effective and it leaves no doubt in the reader's mind that there has been a definitive final outcome.

While I cannot rave about this offering from Harold Coyle, I am glad I finished. I was dismayed at the factual errors, but at the same time found myself overlooking them as I sought to reach the ending. Suspense is sporadic, but the ending is well done. Mr. Coyle has departed from his formulaic retelling of the Dixon family saga with an up and down ride into the world of elite special ops troops. That makes the book worth investing some time with.

Rating:
Summary: Not the Harold Coyle I Am Used To
Review: I have greatly enjoyed most of Coyle's books in the past, so I expected more of the same in this book. How wrong I was. The plot concept is ripe for quality action and writing, but Coyle instead spends more time waxing poetic about the philosophies of command and the ethos of combat. Of the 298 pages in the book, maybe 8 are vintage Coyle; the rest are drawn out editorials and dull character descriptions. There is next to no character development whatsoever; aside from their respective nationalities, each of the main characters is indistinguishable for the other. I honestly struggled to find the will to finish this book, and I agree with other reviewers that it appears that Coyle was either on a deadline or his new publishing house has an axe to grind.