Tropic Heat

Super Bolan #9

by Don Pendleton (Series Creator), Charlie McDade (Contributor)

Mack Bolan takes on Diego Cardona, a powerful drug smuggler whose center of operations is in Bolivia

Genres: Fiction

352 pages, Mass Market Paperback

First published August 1, 1987

About the author

Don Pendleton was born in Little Rock, Arkansas, December 12, 1927 and died October 23, 1995 in Arizona.

He wrote mystery, action/adventure, science-fiction, crime fiction, suspense, short stories, nonfiction, and was a comic scriptwriter, poet, screenwriter, essayist, and metaphysical scholar. He published more than 125 books in his long career, and his books have been published in more than 25 foreign languages with close to two hundred million copies in print throughout the world.

After producing a number of science-fiction and mystery novels, Don launched in 1969 the phenomenal Mack Bolan: The Executioner, which quickly emerged as the original, definitive Action/Adventure series. His successful paperback books inspired a new particularly American literary genre during the early 1970's, and Don became known as "the father of action/adventure."

"Although The Executioner Series is far and away my most significant contribution to world literature, I still do not perceive myself as 'belonging' to any particular literary niche. I am simply a storyteller, an entertainer who hopes to enthrall with visions of the reader's own incipient greatness."

Don Pendleton's original Executioner Series are now in ebooks, published by Open Road Media. 37 of the original novels.

Wikipedia: Don Pendleton

Reviews

[Mark Schwind · Rating 3 out of 5]

My review of Tropic Heat by Charlie McDade. 1987.

With mixed emotions, Mack Bolan joins an elite team of experts assembled by the Justice Department. He's given a partner, Callahan, who is younger and straight out of a John Ford picture (according to the author). Their mission: take down the international drug empire headed by a Bolivian bad guy named Cardona.

Once in Bolivia, Bolan learns that his mission has been compromised. Cardona was tipped off. Who is the mole? Callahan? The beautiful stewardess who hit on him on the flight to La Paz? And why is the stewardess a guest at the fortress home of Cardona?

And who is Cardona? He's a coke sniffing effeminate bad guy with a strong passion for anything the color white, including the interior decor of his home.

Mack Bolan shares the stage with two other storylines, both connected to Cardona and the production, distribution and monetization of cocaine.

Lee, a young African American hit man living in Chicago, is trying to save his brother Albert from the crack epidemic of the 80s.

Cardona owns the crack trade in Miami but the Italian mafia wants in. It won't be easy for the mafia because they're in crisis mode; a war of ascension between a young gun and an old school Italian mob boss is erupting. And the old boss wants nothing to do with crack, but his young lieutenant, Joey Buccieri, wants to take over the trade from the Bolivians.

By cutting back and forth, from Chicago to Miami, Bolivia to Mexico, with a different set of characters and a different story to tell in each location, I thought the author was on his way to telling an epic story about the crack epidemic. Unfortunately, the storytelling becomes routine halfway through and the author doesn't enlarge on any of the themes or stories that he's set up.

All of the characters and story end up in Miami and Bolan teams up with a new unlikely partner. I liked the relationship between Bolan and his new partner, even if the partner's dialogue never had a consistent voice and his character wasn't fully formed.

There's lots of action in this book. All well written and exciting. The author is great at setting up action set pieces and delivering on them.

Do I recommend it? Maybe. It's an easy read and entertaining. But at 380 pages, it has too little story and too little story development to really succeed as a must read.

[Tom · Rating 3 out of 5]

These double-length Super Bolans are somewhat feast or famine: either you get an author who can use the extra space to develop things a little more while still setting up and knocking down the requisite number of action sequences, or you just get twice as much nonsense (as is the case with Resurrection Day, for instance). I'd put this one in that first category, and I'd take these over the mainline Executioner books that were coming out around the same time.

It's a essentially just a solid, 1980s, B-grade, action film. Or, in this case, a big budget episode of Miami Vice. Does exactly what it says on the tin.