Customer Reviews

To the Death

5 star:		(8)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(5)
2 star:		(7)
1 star:		(9)

 

 

Patrick Robinson has had a great run with Admiral Arnold Morgan. His crabby protangonist has grown tired saving the United States from various and sundry enemies. To The Death is intended to be the coda to Morgan's tale. Unfortunately, Robinson should have put Morgan to bed one book ago.

To The Death starts out strongly. A terror attack on Logan Airport, some torture in Guantanamo, then a nice bombing in Syria. Things are looking great. However, looks are deceiving. By page 80 or so, To The Death dies! The rapid fire action and dialogue we have come to love disappears. Even a submarine cameo can't bring To The Death back to life.

In a situation similar to Joel Rosenberg's Dead Heat, Robinson faces the dilemna of maintaining action while ending a series. He can't introduce new characters, he can't create new plot lines, he can't leave any loose ends. So, To The Death becomes, almost by necessity, a slow march to the grave.

I would strongly urge new Robinson readers to go back to the beginning. Read Kilo Class and all the early volumes in the series. Then pretend To The Death was never written and create your own ending to Morgan's duties. Not only will you be able to create a better tale than Robinson did here, you will also save yourself 20 bucks.

I read and enjoyed two of Robinson's earlier works, Hunter Killer and Ghost Force. Both received "rave" reviews from me.

Unfortunately, "To The Death" is a turkey. It is dull, highly predictable, contains many factual errors and borrows heavily from the plot of The Day of the Jackal. The novel, which is billed as the "conclusion of his bestselling series starring Admiral Arnold Morgan and his terrorist nemesis, General Ravi Rashood".

The book begins with a bang, so to speak, with a terrorist bomb in Boston's Logan Airport. This scene is so far-fetched that I was tempted to set the novel aside within the first few pages. I would have been better off doing so.

I don't like getting into a lot of plot details for fear of spoiling it for others who may not share my opinion of this book as a waste of time. After all, if you're looking for something to put you to sleep while stuck at an airport or on a long flight, "To The Death" may be helpful.

In any event, the clumsiness of the opening scenes is simply a harbinger of all that follows. A Middle Eastern appearing male in line at an airport security checkpoint asks "Excuse me, sir . . . I have two quite heavy briefcases here and I'm just going over to the Starbucks for some coffee. Would you mind keeping an eye on one of them for me . . .?" The story is set in 2012. Does Thompson seriously expect us to believe that someone would be stupid enough to go along with this request? How is the Middle Easterner going to exit the security queue? No questions about how he is going to manage carrying a coffee with his two "quite heavy" briefcases? In any event, the companion to the yokel who agrees to watch the one briefcase notices - big surprise - that the Middle Eastern appearing gentleman has passed the Starbucks and is heading for the exit.

There begins what is supposed to be an exciting sequence where a cop grabs the suspicious briefcase, runs through the concourse, across the roadway, throws it into the parking lot where it explodes without seriously injuring anyone. Believable? No.

The bomb tossing cop's partner just happens to spot a car picking up the terrorist and manages to shoot the driver, capturing the other terrorist. Believable in the circumstances? No.

Lt. Commander Jimmy Ramshawe, assistant to the Director of the National Security Agency, is frantic over a call the NSA has intercepted. One call to Damascus. Yeah. Sure.

By page 12, this novel has fallen on its face. It is simply unbelievable. I won't go futher into the plot, but it pits Ravi Rashood, deserter from the British SAS and convert to radical Islam, his (what else would you expect?) ravishingly beautiful terrorist wife Shakira against Admiral Arnold Morgan, former NSA head, confidant of Presidents and his colleagues. Rashood, Morgan and others were interesting characters in earlier books. In "To The Death", they are transparent and unbelievable.

The storyline concerns Rashood's obsession with assinating Morgan. One unbelivable scene follows another. Of course, brilliant Ramshawe is always both a step behind and a step ahead in warning Morgan that an assination plot is afoot, but stubborn old Morgan won't listen.

Ultimately Robinson borrows a big part of the plot from "The Day of the Jackal", which only makes this novel worse than it already was.

Robinson either wrote this in a hurry, didn't do his research, has contempt for his reader's intelligence or all three. Factual errors abound.

For example, the devout Muslim General Rashood is aboard a naval vessel belonging to the Islamic Republic of Iran - where he enjoys a ham and cheese sandwich. Ham on a ship belonging to the Iranian Navy? A supposedly devout and fanatical Muslim eating ham?

On the same ship, Robinson describes the captain as being so knowledgable that "[u]pon the slightest problem with the ship, the crew aways called on the commanding officer, who understood the workings of his ship better than anyone else". Can you imagine any ship's captain who would put up with crew members coming to him to solve their "slightest problem"? Give us all a break, Mr. Robinson.

Like all too many authors these days (Barry Eisler being a particularly egregious example), Robinson tries to fake a knowledge of computers and information technology. Robinson - not for the first time - has Rashood doing a search with Google. He has Rashood "waiting patiently" while a search is carried out. In another instance, he has Google taking nine seconds to return results. Google, of course, is famed for the speed of its searches. A Google search for "Patrick Robinson" returned 245,000 results in 0.27 seconds. Mr. Robinson either doesn't know how to use Google or believes his readers dont'. It appears to be the former since this super sophisticated know-it-all terrorist submits some truly silly search requests.

To enhance the supposed importance of one of the characters, Robinson has him ferried from Washington to Scotland aboard Air Force One, which Robinson correctly says bears another designation when the President is not onboard. Simply unbelievable.

He has one of his protagonists using a Sig Sauer "revolver". As far as I can determine, Sig has never produced a revolver. A 7.62mm rifle with a silencer is featured. While such a suppressor would reduce the noise of firing at the shooter's location, there would still be the crack produced as the supersonic bullet moves through the sound barrier, thus making the use of a silencer worthless in the situation Robinson describes.

All in all, "To The Death" is readable, but you'd probably have to be desperate to read it. I was simply foolish in doing so. I wanted to see if it could get worse than it was - and it did. A great disappointment from Patrick Robinson, whose earlier work I enjoyed.

Jerry

In this newest Robinson book Admiral Morgan is once again the hero. After a terrorist bomb plot is stopped in Boston's Logan Airport the services of Admiral Arnold Morgan are once again called for by President Paul Bedford. One suspect is arrested and shipped to Guantanamo Bay by
Admiral Morgan. After gathering intelligence through intercepts a band
of terrorists are arrested. The discover that Hamas General Ravi Rashood
is the brains behind this operation. In conjunction with the Israelis the
home of Ravi Rashood is blown off the face of the earth. Ravi is not in the house and Shakira survives. The Hamas War Council decides that it is time for Admiral Arnold Morgan to die. Shakira goes to America and gains valuable information from Kathy Morgan's mother about where Admiral Morgan will be traveling on an upcoming vacation. General Rashood attempts to kill Admiral Morgan in London and misses. The President assigns Commander Rick Hunter(SEAL) to be Morgan's bodyguard. This leads to a confrontation in Scotland where there will be a battle "to the Death". This is without question a very good book. Be sure not to miss it.

This was a story that had a lot of potential, but turned out to be shallowly written. The bomb plot at Logan was a great start, but the development of the story went downhill from there.
I was totally disappointed with the performance of the Mossad in Damascus. They missed the obvious by not paying attention to details. They weren't sure that Ravi Rashood was with his wife when they returned to the house, but they just assumed that it was him. Huh? I thought that they were a great intelligence agency. It was obvious from the story that it wasn't him. Also, the team leader stated that they would watch for the return of Ravi and Shakira and trigger the bomb when they entered the house, but then another stated that they wouldn't be able to get away afterwards, So the leader said that was why they were going to put the bomb on a timer. How did he get there?
The author had a propensity for stating the obvious in many cases. And the characters, who were supposed to be "bigger than life" missed a lot of obvious clues. I was expecting Admiral Morgan to get killed in the story and it would have only been just based on the performance of the characters who were supposed to protect him. It was hard to connect to any of the characters in the story.
After reading Vince Flynn and Lee Child, this story was a real disappointment. It was my first Patrick Robinson book and it will be my last. I'm glad that I got this book from the library. I would have been really upset if I'd paid money to read it.

Craig

I enjoy plausible fiction in which means that occasionally the characters in those works of fiction are larger than life, their motives are realistic and the cliches are kept to a minimum.

I didn't find this book to fit that model. I have not read any of Patrick Robinson's other books so I don't know if this is a pattern or if it's unique to this one work. Perhaps if I read the previous Admiral Morgan stories, I would have enjoyed this one more. I felt that it read "flat" and was too stereotypical and to predictable to get a great review from me.

<Yawn ....>

I have been a big fan of Patrick Robinson's series with Arnold Morgan. Maybe it's me, maybe I'm jaded or maybe the novelty has worn off.

Maybe the series is just grinding and winding down. For some reason, I grew bored with this tale, which tracks arch villain Ravi Rashood - a/k/a The Towel head - in his obsessive quest to assassinate Adm. Arnold Morgan.

By the end, you might be begging Rashood to put you out of YOUR misery.

A terrorist's bomb explodes in Logan airport - Admiral Arnold Morgan must hunt down those responsible. "To The Death" is a fast paced political thriller from New York Times Best Selling Author Patrick Robinson, and this is his finale to his much acclaimed Admiral Morgan series. In a plot to foil his own assassination, he must travel all over the world in this deftly written thriller, sure to please his legions of fans. "To The Death" is a must for community library thriller collections.

A great read what I have come to expect from the Arnold Morgan series .Plenty of intrique and action from one of the premier writers in the action adventure field .

Perhaps it helps not to have read any of Patrick Robinson's previous novels, as some on here seem to be comparing this book to earlier ones in the series in an unfavorable manner. I liked this novel and I liked it a lot and I will probably pick up some of the earlier efforts in due time, but notwithstanding that I found this to be right in the genre of Vince Flynn and others and a very good stand alone read.

The characters of the Hamas asassins, General Ravi Rashood and his wife Shakira are well drawn and I found them very believable both as to their motivation and their conduct. Shakira's part of the book as she traveled to the United States and then to Ireland and England were very well written.

Admiral Morgan has been developed in other books, apparently, but enough is disclosed of his character to assist the reader in understanding his attitude, intellect and temperment.

There simply is a lot about this story and the way it is told to hold the reader and make this a page turner and I recommend it to any who are fans of this type of modern day thriller.

This book concludes a fairly long running series of books. I was somewhat disappointed that Mr. Robinson strayed from what he is great at: submarines. But that said this was a good book. The criticism about political commentary is overblown, there just is not that much in this book. The book moves along fairly well. The only real criticism I have is in the middle of the book when we know that the Israeli commandos will fail since there are a couple hundred pages to go, but most authors do that.

All in all more a political thriller, not his usual sub thriller but still worth a read. It would be worthwhile to read the books that begin the series to really see the background of the antagonists.