Customer Reviews

Force Protection

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I'd dearly love to give this novel five stars. Four hundred of its 403 pages are a pure delight. Taut, gut-wrenching, can't put it down thriller. The last three pages, unfortunately, take a lot of the wind out of the sails. They don't ruin the experience: just kind of diminish it.

Alan Craik finds himself in Kenya, sneaking a gun through customs while his colleague, a female special Navy Criminal Investigation agent blows through customs carrying drugs. A naval vessel making a port call is bombed and Craik is very much in the middle of things.

Kent is a superb writer; no doubt about that. He relentlessly builds the tension as the tentacles of an international plot envelop his wife, an astronaut in training in Houston and a Carrier Battle Group.

There are no flaws in the characters. The good guys and gals are good: humans, not super-heroes. Sometimes they catch a lucky break or think their ways through a dicey situation. Sometimes things don't work out and they wind up very dead. Above all, they are believable. You suck in your breath when they're in a tight spot - and there are lots of tight spots.

The bad guys are believably evil- and you hope they'll all suffer for their evil ways.

The plotting is just plain great. Nothing unbelievable, no jars that make you swallow your credulity. Except for the last three pages. I don't know if Kent needed to keep some characters alive for another book (many of the characters have appeared in his other novels) or if an editor slipped or what. But the last three pages just don't fit with the rest of the story.

But that shouldn't stop you from reading it, if you're a lover of thrillers. Like I said, this a five-star story. The only reason I knocked it down is because of the last three pages. Still a very enjoyable read.

Jerry

Interesting, but the reader should not believe that the real Navy is anything like the one depicted in the story. It is written by a father-son team using one pseudonym. They apparently have prior Naval service between them. In the book, they interposed about five different plots together, which to me was confusing and hard to understand. Surprisingly, they also called a ship a boat, which isn't done.

The most glaring thing about the story was the Navy characters mouthing off to each other and demonstrating unprofessional, juvenile attitudes, which would be misleading to readers not familiar with the Navy. Naval personnel just don't act that way--for very long, that is.

About the most improbable part of the main plot was the lead characters, Naval Intelligence agents, trying to sneak guns and drugs past foreign customs, for what reason I have no idea, and which I don't think is a US Navy mission. Still haven't figured out why they did this.

The authors could have written a more plausible story, that they didn't is unfortunate. The authors also seem to show that the mission of the US Navy is to singlehandedly save the world from the bad guys, on both land and sea, and the other US agencies are stumblebums. Again, I don't think so. The authors have one other book in print.

Yeah, that says it all really. It's one of those books where you always want to read just one more page before you put it down. It drags you along almost from the first word and it won't let you go until the end. Be prepared for a late night when you start reading it! It got me just as strongly even on the second reading.

I'm not going to bore with another review of the plot. It works. The necessary coincidences and intuitions without which most novels would be very short and inconclusive are not overdone; nor are they too wild for credibility. It doesn't jar when things fall into place.

This was the first Gordon Kent I read. It wasn't the last. I now have the full set and there are not many authors of military/espionage books that have become permanent residents on my bookshelves. The earlier books are good too but I would say this is the first one where the writing team really started to rock with the right mix of depth and adrenaline. If you like this type of story, it stands tall alongside Clancy and a very small handful of others.

Although this book was obviously written by a former naval aviator, people who are (sometimes) affectionately known as Airdales, since no one in the "real navy" would ever call a ship a "boat", this was a fun read.

I'm not competent to discuss the book's literary merits so I'll only say it had a logical and fast paced narrative and was hard to put down. The frequent switch of focus from Houston to Mombassa to Washington, etc., took a bit of getting used to but became less noticeable as the story progressed.

Note to Airdales: a boat is a vessel carried on a ship (except for submarines but that's another story).

This book picks you and moves you along. There is action and great plotting. You keep turning the pages, because this is a great great read.

So what happened to the ending?

Basically, you have someone who pulled an Osama bin Laden against the United States Navy. Now, the bad guy is unmasked and his location is known. Can you say a cruise missile is flying through the bad guys bedroom window? I can.

Unfortunately, that's not the ending for this book, and quite frankly I cannot envision any other type of ending for the book.

We're talking pay back here, and it never happens.