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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Desert of ideas - bland mission,
By Tony Roberts (Bristol, United Kingdom) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Casca #16 Desert Mercenary (Mass Market Paperback)
While interesting enough in that its a rescue mission set in the early 60s in Algeria, its just a little too much of a 'comic' style story, with the characters lacking depth and as a result you don't feel any sympathy towards them. The bad guy - a renegade ex-Wehrmacht officer turned Tuareg - is so two-dimensional its surprising he can't slip under a door.
The character of Gus Beidemann, which is always worth a read, is far too coarse and stuck in the idea of the bad social habits the earlier depictions in Panzer Soldier and Legionnaire showed, that he's hardly one to like. Even African Mercenary showed a more human side to Gus which was absent here. This is a perfect demonstration of how to take likeable characters from earlier books and turn them into caricatures so that the reader can't identify with them. The one character that had any interest for me was Sharif Mahmud, the Arab tribal leader. At least he relieved the tedium of a passionless group of mercenaries being assembled by Casca to rescue two teenagers from the clutches of a 'terrorist' cell on a mountaintop. The best part of this book was when the attack on the camp came and this raced along fairly well. After that there was a sort of unravelling and too many of the characters were killed off. The writer (a ghost writer, not Sadler) confused himself because if you jot down the names on a piece of paper and then cross them off when they get killed, he misses one or two out. Suddenly you have only a handful left, including miraculously the two teenagers despite trained military people dying by the bucketload. The character of the medical officer, Sims, was so obviously stolen from the film 'Wild Geese' its embarrassing. All in all an average book. Worth a read but nothing to shout about.
0 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Coming back into the mythos fray...,
By Apollo Reader (Florida) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Casca #16 Desert Mercenary (Mass Market Paperback)
This Casca novel brought Barry Sadler back from the dregs of the last couple of novels. Better written all around. Perhaps because this was what Sadler knew firsthand more. I dunno.
Either way, this was one of those that could be a neat movie, the likes of Man On Fire. It was alot like that.
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