Hot Lead and Cold Steel

The Rat Bastards #8

by Len Levinson, John Mackie (Pseudonym)

They're on the rampage! They're bad news wherever they go. Slogging their way through steaming jungles choked with blood. Digging out from the stone-cold tunnels of an underground tomb. To them, death is just a sick joke-a joke played on anyone dumb enough to stand in their way. The Rat Bastards. Nothing is more important to them than winning.

202 pages, Mass Market Paperback

First published September 1, 1984

About the author

AKA John Mackie, J. Farragut Jones, Nicholas Brady and Gordon Davis; also has ghost written as Clay Dawson.

Born in New Bedford, Massachusetts, Len Levinson served on active duty in the U.S. Army from 1954-1957, and graduated from Michigan State University with a BA in Social Science. He relocated to NYC that year and worked as an advertising copywriter and public relations executive before becoming a full-time novelist.
Len has had over eighty titles published and has created and wrote a number of series, including The Apache Wars Saga, The Pecos Kid, The Rat Bastards, and The Sergeant.
After many years in NYC, Len moved to a small town (pop. 3100) in rural Illinois, where he is now surrounded by corn and soybean fields ... a peaceful, ideal location for a writer.

Reviews

[Tim Deforest · Rating 4 out of 5]

A stand-out in an excellent series, this one is full of particularly intense and brutal action. Of course, this is true with every volume of the series, but Levinson hits a particularly high bar this time. There's a bloody attack on a Japanese stronghold followed by the remnants of the titular recon platoon getting trapped in a network of tunnels after the explosion of an ammunition dump collapses the exits. It is true edge-of-your-seat action with barely a pause for breath.

We are reminded that none of the men we've followed through the previous books are immune from getting killed or wounded. In this one, I was constantly surprised by how abruptly a main character could be taken out of the story. Of course, one of the themes of the series is that anyone can die at anytime in combat. But the devastation of the recon platoon this time around was nonetheless shocking.

Amidst all this are several sometimes heartbreaking character arcs. A Japanese soldier decides he doesn't want to die for the Emperor and desperately searches for a way to survive. A medic and conscientious objector is forced to kill an enemy soldier and struggles with the right and wrong with this. Not everyone we meet is particularly likeable, but Levinson makes us care about all of them regardless.

[Paperbackbooks86 · Rating 4 out of 5]

Book #8 in the Rat Bastards series takes an interesting approach. This is the first time in the series we start to look at different aspects of the war, and not just endless, and brutal killings.

We find characters discovering the war is used to sell products back home. Two new characters are introduced, and at first I wasn’t sure I enjoyed their storyline, but the further it went on, the more I became interested.

These characters added a new layer into the series, in showing the brutal side of war. However; the love story wishing this new story arch I could do without. This wasn’t my favorite of the books so far, but still enjoyable. 4 out of 5 stars.

[Ted · Rating 2 out of 5]

War pulp. For those of you not keeping count other than the unknown numbers he mows down with a machine gun Bannon kills only one other Jap.

[Michael David · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great story telling. Love the characters, and the combat writing. I wish Ken would proofread better. I find many mistakes in his writing.