Customer Reviews

Hostile Intent

5 star:		(21)
4 star:		(12)
3 star:		(10)
2 star:		(7)
1 star:		(36)

 

 

I loved this book!!! I could not believe it was free, and as I read it, I kept thinking that it was as good or better than most of the spy/thriller that I had purchased for 9.99 or more. The action is fast paced, and it hooked me almost inmediately.
I am puzzled by some of the reviews that state that the author used intricate vocabulary. I only read the reviews after finishing the book, and I can honestly say that I did NOT find the language contrived or anything different from other fast paced Action/Thrillers.
If you love and wait patiently for the newest Thrillers, get this book. You have nothing to lose (its free), and will be on the edge of your seat for the whole ride. I looked up the author, and was willing to buy full price, but it seems that this is his first (and only) novel of this genre.

Hostile Intent is an excellent book that grabbed my attention from the first few pages and didn't let go. Oftentimes in this genre, the author attempts to introduce a legion of characters and settings in such a whirlwind of activity that I have trouble keeping everything straight. In this instance, while the book maintains the convention of several key characters and simultaneous scenes, I found the organization coherent enough to keep track and maintain my interest in each of the various plot lines. The pace was exciting enough to keep me reading well into the wee hours of the morning. This book is well worth the price (free as of this review) and, more importantly, worth the time it takes to read it. In the current political environment, I wouldn't say this book is politically correct, but it is a page turner.

I found this book riveting, and couldn't put it down.

The central character - Devlin - is a wonderful creation. A real American hero. The kind of guy that Jack Nicholson was talking about in A Few Good Men when he said "You want me on that wall."

I find some of the comments here - both political and technical - widely off the mark.

If you believe that all our problems are going to disappear by singing kumbaya, then this isn't a book for you. But guys like Devlin will protect you anyway.

And so far as the questions concerning the Large Hadron Collider go, well... I'm in this business. And he's right: Like the SETI project (the search for extra-terrestrial life software that you can download onto your computer) Hadon is networked in a way to both use - and allow for - massively linked supercomputing.

Walsh's writing is smart, interesting, and incisive. He's not aiming for the New York Review of Books here. But he does provide you with the kind of storytelling and subject matter that Hollywood refuses to provide these days. And in this regard, he scores a bulls eye.

My brother gave me this book to read and I was excited because it was on my list and I was looking forward to it. I got to page 30 and was I had my doubts by the time I got to page 50 I was like I'm not wasting any more time on a book where I truly don't care what happens HATE the lead character and is dull. There are too many books out there like (Dan Silva, Andrew Britton, John Hart, Brian Haig and Alex Berenson) that are worth reading. If you time is not valuable go ahead and waste it on this book, but mine is worth too much to me to do so.

It is hard to ignore the right wing politics of this book, which is a shame, because it is a genuine page-turner with plenty of twists and turns to keep you guessing, a more than adequate beach read that anyone of any political persuasion should be able to enjoy.

I say this as a conservative who largely agrees with the author, Michael Walsh's, not so subtle message about the West's 50 year attempt at suicide through a combination of low birth rates, a culture that celebrates mediocrity, and our cult of guilt over doing what it takes to survive in a dangerous world.

But the various characters' long inner monologues on these and many more topics get old by the middle of the book, and I found myself skimming over these sections to get to an actual plot development. In fact, Hostile Intent reminded me a little of the writings of Ayn Rand, in that the stories are simply a vehicle for her morality lessons. Combine Alex Berenson with Ayn Rand, and you probably get something similar to Michael Walsh.

Walsh says he wrote Hostile Intent to honor the intelligence officers and secret agents that live lives of extreme danger and even greater loneliness. This is certainly a laudable goal, especially considering the beating the CIA is now taking over their interrogation practices, but if he wanted to honor these men, he might have started by making the hero of the story likeable. Instead, we get Devlin, an arrogant and fundamentally immoral, highly trained and lethal government agent of an elite, unknown agency who does what he does not for any love of country, but only because it is what he was raised to do.

So rather than illustrate the case for allowing the men and women of the military and intelligence communities to do what it takes to protect the American people, Walsh creates a character guided by no sense of shared humanity with those he is working to protect. This is exactly the caricature of the CIA and many of our fine fighting men and women that the Left is so rightly criticized for trying to depict.

Walsh tries at times to make you feel for Devlin and give you a glimpse of his humanity. For instance, at one point, Devlin kills some FBI agents who were being used as pawns against him. The brief pang of remorse he shows toward one woman agent is later ruined when you find out the callous way in which he piles up their bodies for the authorities to find. Similarly, Devlin's romance with a mysterious Arab woman comes across as absurdly rushed and totally unbelievable.

The chief villain of the story, Emmanuel Skorzeny is far more interesting than the protagonist. The character of Skorzeny is pretty much just equal parts a Bond villain, Leigh Teabing from The DaVinci code, and George Soros. Still, this makes his long soliloquies and rants about the fall of Western civilization are less frustrating, because it comes across as more believable from a villain. Furthermore, Walsh adeptly keeps you guessing through most of the book as to what Skorzeny's true goals and motivations are.

Hostile Intent's other main failing is the incessant amount of techno babble. Yes, a spy novel is inherently going to involve some pretty cool and far-fetched pieces of technology - that's part of the appeal, but Walsh really lays it on thick, and the result is entire paragraphs that are pretty much gibberish, at least to the typical reader. Simply put, the fantastic technologies just didn't come across as believable, and the invasiveness of them again undercuts, I think, Walsh's stated goal for the book, as a rebuke to those who so reflexively demonize our intelligence communities.

So why am I giving this book 4 stars? Because it succeeds as a thriller. There are lots of twists and turns and it kept me guessing to the very end. Furthermore, Walsh writes actions scenes very well, and you can really see the fight scenes play out in your head as you read along. I thoroughly enjoyed the read, especially considering the price - I nabbed it for free during one of the Kindle promotions.

I just wish the politics of the book were a little easier to overlook because novels with an overtly political message are inherently going to be judged that way. This either alienates those who come from an opposite point of view, or frustrates people like me who find the way it is dealt with clumsy.

I really wanted to like this book. It starts out fairly well, but just disintegrates as you get into it. It is almost as if this was the first draft of a story, and never edited or even re-read by the author.

The technical details are so laughable that you very quickly just skip over them. It's like the Star Trek write who admitted that he just inserted "tech the tech tech" whenever he needed a technical explanation for whatever. Except here it's just Technobabble; truly laughable. "Reversing the polarity on the deflector dish" would make MUCH more sense, even in context.

Other passages (like how the villain's father was a Roman Catholic "vicar") are bewildering at best. As far as the action is concerned, it's comic book level ZAP! POW! and whatever the author wants to happen, happens, with no rhyme or reason.

I'm about 1/3rd into the Kindle version, and regret my four dollars. Next.

I had heard some good things about one of the author's other books. I decided to try this one as it was written earlier. That was a mistake.

I still do not know if the one that I heard about is any good or not. I am not sure that I will even try it as this one is not at all well done. It is disjointed and poorly edited. Also, the author's technical knowledge is substandard.

The author is not remotely comparable to Vince Flynn or Tom Clancy, who both excel at their craft. I suspect that the only people who will think this is a great book are those that have not read much. I would skip this one.

I seldom submit reviews for books I've read. But then, I don't stop people on the road to tell them the road is good, either. But, if I hit a pothole or there's some hazard on the road, I feel it's my duty to warn others. This book is a pothole. Even if you overlook the fifty-cent words poorly injected throughout and the tedious character development, the plot convolutions will have you scratching your head. Mostly unbelievable, from beginning to end. Unbelievable too that I read the whole thing, though I did just skim the parts that hurt too much. Definitely a pothole.

Reading this book is like watching a train wreck: it's horrible, but you have to look to see just how horrible it is.

After reading the first chapter I thought that this was a regular mass-market paperback spy-thriller, but it kept getting worse and worse with every chapter. I didn't previously believe it was possible to get a book this bad published, but I guess I was proven wrong.

The plot is non-sensical, confusing and contrived.
The characters are flat, stereotypical and not engaging.
The technical details (especially everything that has to do with computers) are laughably absurd.

Perhaps this book might be the book equivalent of 'Plan 9 from outer space', but I believe it will fail even in the competition for worst book.

The only silver lining is that I got the book for free on Kindle.

I bought this book because Rush Limbaugh recommended the second in the series (Early Warning) and especially because he said Walsh's books were as good as the Vince Flynn books (which I really like). Boy, was he ever wrong. In addition to a completely ridiculous story, there was no character development, the story was very hard to follow, and I have never read anything so filled with trite cliches in my life.
The only reason I finished the book was I expected it to eventually have some redeeming quality beause Limbaugh so highly recommended it. Unfortunately, it never did.
This book is a waste of time and money, don't bother.