Customer Reviews

No Mercy

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

 

 

Some 30 years ago, Forbes was among the top thriller writers going. I highly recommend such titles from the 70's and 60's as TRAMP IN ARMOR or HEIGHTS OF ZERVOS. But in the past few decades he seems to have sadly gone downhill, particularly in this ongoing series with Tweed. The dialogue is unbelievable, the villains are cardboard, and the action seems to follow no rule of logic or deduction. What this reminds me of is such pulpish work as Sexton Blake or Doc Savage.

This book is merciless. We are treated to a parade of cardboard characters, stilted dialogue and dubious plotting.

This book has all the charm of an IRS audit.

This is one of the worst thrillers / mysteries I have read. The characters are unbelievable, the dialogue is exceedingly disappointing .. what else can I say?

No Mercy is another one of Forbes late novels. All of his books from 2000 onwards have notoriously negative reviews on Amazon, and not without reason. The stories are silly, the dialog unbelievable and the heroes rely more on luck than on talent. Despite all their flaws, there's something that makes me come back to them. Perhaps it's the familiarity, or just that they're so undemanding, brainless, easy to read. "No Mercy" starts out as a murder mystery. Detective Buchanan is too busy so he asks Tweed and his team at SIS to take over the investigation. Turns out it was a good idea since the muders turn out to be connected to a terrorist threat. But the book doesn't offer any espionage. I'd give the book a weak 3 star rating. It doesn't have the big continuity errors that The Vorpal Blade had but it's also not as good as The Main Chance. I wouldn't recommend it to most people, but fans of Colin Forbes who know what to expect may want to give it a chance.

The prose is quaint, but that's about the only thing worth mentioning of this book. The characters and plot are so preposterous that an elementary school child wouldn't come up with them, and in Forbes' universe people in 2003 are still using typewriters instead of computers, and half of the technology seems to be directly from the 1960s. How anyone thought this would be worth printing is beyond me.