Gilbert M. Stack's Blog, page 65

Review: Gotrek and Felix 8 Orcslayer by Nathan Long

Gotrek and Felix 8 Orcslayer by Nathan Long

When Nathan Long takes over as author of the Gotrek and Felix series, he advances the storyline two decades into the future. Gotrek and Felix are trying to return to the empire as Gotrek continues to seek his elusive doom and Felix continues chronicling his heroic efforts to die. The novel starts on a high note as Gotrek has himself catapulted onto an orc ship so he and his axe can reach the bad guys. Then matters slow down a little so Gotrek and Felix can find their latest quest—helping a former friend recover a dwarven stronghold.

 

There are two very good things about this novel. The first is an extended look at dwarven grudges—epitomized in the senseless enmity between Gotrek and his former friend. The second is the fascinating force behind the orc invasion of the dwarven stronghold. The clues that things are off—that this isn’t a typical orc attack—grow throughout the novel and the solution to the mystery is both creepy and fitting for the Warhammer universe. My only real complaint about the novel was that it ran a little too long.

 

 

Review: The Final Death by Warren Murphy and Richard Sapir

Destroyer 29 The Final Death by Warren Murphy and Richard Sapir

The Final Death continues a string of very weak Destroyer novels. The best element was a conversation between exiting President Gerald Ford and newly sworn in President Jimmy Carter in which Ford passes to his successor knowledge of the existence of CURE. Carter, of course, is horrified to find out that there is an off-the-books government agency acting unconstitutionally to protect the country. He is indignantly ready to close CURE down, until Ford’s warning sinks in and he realizes that maybe, just maybe, he will need an agency no one knows about to help him do his job.

 

The actual plot is weak—a Chinese cult that has been around for at least a thousand years is trying to kill off Americans by poisoning beef. While the plot was bad, the element of the ages old cult let us take a look at an earlier stage of Sinanju before they became the sun-source of the martial arts. Watching Master Pak at work shows where many of Chiun’s hard-learned lessons came from. But overall, this was not enough to salvage the story.

 

Review: Operation Stalemate by Daniel Wrinn

Operation Stalemate by Daniel Wrinn

Operation Stalemate is the story of the grinding battle to take the island of Peleilu in the Pacific Theater during World War II. On Peleilu, Allied forces encountered a highly motivated enemy which had learned the lessons of their early Pacific Theater losses and was determined to make the Allies pay for every inch of ground they took. Wrinn gets into the heads of the Japanese commanders and shows how they developed their plans to stall the allies and make the price in human life as high as possible. Then he gets into the heads of the marines and shows them struggle to get out of a killing box and eliminate the Japanese threat. The cost was tremendously high. The battle, often described as a siege, was a long and grueling one. And while the Allies were victorious, victory was so hard won that it didn’t come with the feeling of triumph that accompanied the other battles Wrinn has recounted. Perhaps that’s why he chose to end the book by showing the actual tactical and strategic and even accidental importance that Peleilu assumed for the rest of the war. This included hosting the airfield from which the scout plane that discovered the crew of the famous Indianapolis, as they tried to survive in the water after their battleship was sunk on the return voyage from delivering its cargo of atomic weapons.

 

 

Review: To Kill an Archangel by Curtis M. Lawson

To Kill an Archangel by Curtis M. Lawson

The sequel to It’s a Bad, Bad, Bad, Bad World picks up with the handful of survivors from the first novel (yes, there actually were a couple) and shows how their lives have come apart after their encounters with the daggers. The two orphans have gone through a myriad of foster homes—one obsessed with getting the knives back and the other trying to forget that she was intended as a sacrifice for the blades. The third, the Rhodesian Mercenary, seems less effected. He’s healthier thanks to the daggers, but wants to get the lingering visions out of his head. He agrees to try and recover the knives from the serial killer who currently owns them on the condition that they be destroyed. That condition will end up with him invading the Vatican for the tools he needs to finish the job.

 

Catholics will not be happy with how the pope is portrayed in this novel, but don’t let that deter you from reading the book. Like the first, the action is nonstop, the characters are wonderfully crafted, and the tension just continues to rise from beginning to end. The daggers can corrupt anyone and so no one is truly trustworthy as they try to destroy the artifacts that reportedly have a corrupted archangel trapped within them.

 

The ending is outstanding. I can’t wait to learn what happens next.

 

 

Review: It's a Bad, Bad, Bad, Bad World by Curtis M. Lawson

It’s a Bad, Bad, Bad, Bad World by Curtis M. Lawson

This is a tale of two magical daggers that act as vampires, transferring the life, vitality, and soul of the person stabbed to the person doing the stabbing. Old people become younger and stronger. Injured people heal instantaneously. Sick people become healthy. All at the small price of being turned into a crazed homicidal maniac.

 

Naturally, most people don’t believe the legend behind the daggers is true. They just see extremely valuable artifacts of an earlier age. When the knives are sort of accidentally stolen, lots of people become interested in possessing them. Most initially want to claim the reward, but just about everyone gets seduced by the very real power of the blades. This makes for a madcap adventure in which large numbers of people are seeking the prize in a very dark parody of the famous comedy, It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World.

 

The truth is, I expected to like this book, but was surprised by just how quickly I fell in love with it. Lawson’s characters are fantastic—quirky (if not outright weird)—and many of them are really, really, bad. All of them are in over their heads. Watching people struggle to obtain or regain possession of these magic items was fascinating. Wondering who would ultimately survive made for a gripping and extremely fast-paced storyline. Honestly, my only problem with the tale was that it came to an end.

 

Fortunately, there’s a sequel.

 

Review: Shadows of Doubt

Shadows of Doubt by Timothy R. Baldwin

It’s really difficult to write an authentic mystery featuring teenaged detectives, but you wouldn’t know it from reading Timothy R. Baldwin’s new novel, Shadows of Doubt. In the tradition of the Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew, his four heroes catch the scent of some wrongdoing at their high school and nothing will stop them from ferreting out the truth and catching the criminals. The fact that at the same time they are acting to save the job of one of their fathers just adds urgency and helps us empathize even more with the teens.

 

The camaraderie and touch of romance in the group felt real, but what I really liked was that this did not devolve into a shoot-em-up style climax. Baldwin has thought through each step of the problem, and every element of both the teen-detectives’ investigation and their efforts to expose the truth felt credible to me. I’m looking forward to the next book in the series.

 

Review: Bloody Beaches by Daniel Wrinn

Bloody Beaches by Daniel Wrinn

Daniel Wrinn writes short tight histories of various aspects of the Pacific Theater during World War II. This time he tackled the fabled Marine Raiders, introducing why they were formed, how they were trained, and then following them through their many insertions into enemy occupied territory. The Marine Raiders acted as paratroopers without the parachutes, making stealthy amphibious landings to use surprise to penetrate Japanese defenses. It didn’t always go well and they suffered very heavy casualties throughout the war.

 

Wrinn recounts the history of the Marine Raiders with a laudable level of detail that swings back and forth from the tactical problems to the larger strategic significance of their battles. If you’re looking for a quick overview of this important element of the Marine Corps, you should definitely read this book.

 

Review: Ship of Death by Warren Murphy and Richard Sapir

Destroyer 28 Ship of Death by Warren Murphy and Richard Sapir

This was another weak Destroyer novel with only two truly interesting elements. First, Remo and Chiun decide to cease working for CURE and the U.S. and find a new client. In this case, they choose Iran which is still ruled by the Shah. I thought the decision to do this was fascinating, but the groundwork was poorly laid. Remo is simply feeling disillusioned and Chiun really doesn’t put much effort into finding himself the best deal post-America. He simply settles on Iran because Persia had paid well hundreds of years earlier.

 

The better element was the bad guy who got a tremendous amount of camera footage of Remo and was trying to analyze his abilities. This storyline wouldn’t work later in the series when Murphy and Sapir decided that Chiun and Remo couldn’t be filmed, but it was interesting to watch the attempt to analyze their weaknesses in order to kill them.

 

Overall, this was another very weak book whose plot made little sense (the United Nations decides to leave New York and set up headquarters in a half mile long cruise ship where someone is killing off delegates). I’m hoping the next book will be better.

 

Review: Coils by Fred Saberhagen and Roger Zelazny

Coils by Fred Saberhagen and Roger Zelazny

I love the idea behind this novel. A ruthless billionaire got his company ahead in the world by harnessing the abilities of cyberpath, a telepath, a telekinetic, and a guy who can heal or harm with his mind. The cyberpath got out when he found out that people were being murdered to advance the company’s interests—but there was a twist. He had to agree to be hypnotized so that he forgot everything he had been doing with the company. When the hypnotism begins to fail and his memories return, the billionaire grabs the cyberpath’s girlfriend and attempts to kill his former employee.

 

What follows is a rather straightforward, and I feel, very limited adventure story. Don, the cyberpath, appears to be quite intelligent, but acts as if all he has to do is find his girlfriend and he and she will be allowed to walk off into the sunset. All the while the billionaire is trying to kill him. The really obvious thing for Don to do is to fight back using his own abilities. He could, for example, start wiping out the hard drives on all of the billionaire’s computers. He could, for example, dump the billionaire’s secret files to the press, or other authorities. And I could go on. Instead, he drives across country and attempts to walk into a corporate facility and get his girlfriend.

 

I might also point out that the whole problem could have been avoided if the billionaire used the hypnosis to make Don want to continue working for him. That might actually have led to a better story where Don, on the job, began to recover his memories…

 

All told, there was great promise in this story, but the implementation was rather lacking.

 

The Last Temple by Warren Murphy and Richard Sapir

Destroyer 27 The Last Temple by Warren Murphy and Richard Sapir

This is by far the worst of the Destroyer novels thus far. The plot moves along at a pace slightly slower than cold molasses dripping off a table. It should have been captivating—Remo and Chiun are trying to stop Nazis from exploding one of Israel’s atomic weapons in Israel so that it will destroy the nation—but it just never worked. The only interesting facet of the story is that the head Nazi is superficially similar in appearance to Remo (thin with thick wrists) but the authors don’t utilize this similarity in any effective manner.