Red Phoenix (Mass Market Paperback)

by Larry Bond (Author) "The anchorman looked earnestly into the cameras, seemingly wide-awake despite the early morning hour..." (more)
Key Phrases: declared exclusion zone, sanctions bill, sonar reports, North Korean, South Korea, Comrade Captain (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly
"Tom Clancy's collaborator on Red Storm Rising here makes his first--and impressive--independent contribution to the techno-thriller," wrote PW . Bond establishes a credible scenario of a North Korean invasion of the South, although the novel's individual episodes are more suspenseful than the course of the war as a whole.
Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal
In the aftermath of a series of student riots in Seoul, the U.S. Congress rushes a bill into law which calls for complete withdrawal of American troops from South Korea. This sets off a chain reaction: North Korea attacks across the DMZ, Russia supports North Korea, the Chinese remain neutral, and the United States fights again with its South Korean allies. Bond, a retired naval officer and collaborator with Tom Clancy in writing the best seller Red Storm Rising (LJ 9/1/86), uses all his vast knowledge of things military to keep reader interest level at a peak. This techno-thriller has everything going for it except the mind-boggling use of the Communist Chinese as the new U.N. peacekeepers.
- Jo Ann Vicarel, Cleveland Heights-University Heights P.L., Ohio
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Mass Market Paperback: 736 pages
• Publisher: Grand Central Publishing; First edition (May 1, 1990)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0446359688
• ISBN-13: 978-0446359689
• Product Dimensions: 6.6 x 4.2 x 1.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 11.2 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars See all reviews (60 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #452,158 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A chilling, prescient novel of a Second Korean War...., October 4, 2003

By	Alex Diaz-Granados "fardreaming writer" (Miami, FL United States) - See all my reviews (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

A few months before the fall of the Berlin Wall, Larry Bond and Patrick Larkin's first collaborative effort, Red Phoenix, became a New York Times bestselling novel.

In this novel, Bond (Tom Clancy's uncredited co-author of Red Storm Rising) uses his superb writing skills, experience as a former Navy intelligence expert and talents as a war game designer (he is the creator of Harpoon) to write a terrifying scenario for a second and even more destructive Korean War.

Red Phoenix is set in the early 1990s. North Korea's elderly Great Leader, Kim Il-Sung, is still alive but clearly frail. Day to day control of this isolated and paranoid Stalinist nation is now in the hands of Kim's ambitious son, Kim Jong-Il, the Dear Leader. Ruthless and mercurial, the younger Kim seeks to surpass his father and accomplish what the old man had failed to do in the 1950s: the reunification of the Communist North and the capitalist South.

At first, Kim's plans almost become undone when a team of South Korean and American soldiers discovers a tunnel dug under the DMZ by North Korean combat engineers. In it is a vast stockpile of weapons, ammunition, and even Soviet-made tanks, enough for a battalion of invaders. But events elsewhere, including the office of a Michigan Congressman and the Interior Ministry in Seoul, soon create a perfect convergence of events that enables North Korea's nefarious Dear Leader to mobilize his forces and launch a lightning invasion of South Korea.

Bond and Larkin's novel depicts units, weapons systems, and tactics which were state-of-the-art 14 years ago, and the political makeup of the world has changed since its publication. (Modern day readers might see as archaic Bond's references to the Soviet Union, East Germany, and other Warsaw Pact nations. In early 1989, these may have sided with North Korea, at least nominally. Today, of course, the USSR is no more, East Germany reunited with West Germany and is part of NATO, as is Poland.) However, considering the current and alarming situation as the real Kim Jong-Il races to build and openly deploy nuclear weapons, Red Phoenix is no longer a relic of Cold War-era popular fiction; it is a chilling vision of what a conventional conflict in the Korean Peninsula could have been like before North Korea upped the ante and developed weapons of mass destruction.

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Boom, May 30, 2000

By	Mr. A. Pomeroy (Wiltshire, England) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

A thundering, unsubtle, and hugely entertaining novel of a new Korean war, concentrating on a set of characters (a soldier, an F16 pilot, and the general in charge of the US armed forces) caught up in the turmoil. It isn't high art, but it's excellent at what it does - after a slow, ominous build-up (which takes up the first half of the novel) it's pretty much constant action from then on, on land, on sea, and in the air. The book's only real downside is the abrupt ending - after building the enemy up for 650 pages, they seem to collapse very quickly.

This was Larry Bond's debut novel, and it has some rough edges - Bond is more concerned with the ebb and flow of brigades than individual people, and personal crises (of the 'I'm scared', 'Pull yourself together', 'Okay - I'll try' level) are resolved in a few paragraphs. There's a stab at romance, too, something his subsequent novels steer clear of. Nonetheless, Bond's talent is fully-formed, and this is the best novel to start with (both 'Cauldron' and 'Vortex' are less immediate - South Africa seems less gripping, somehow, and 'Vortex' is set in a near future world which seems increasingly abstract).

As a footnote, it makes a fascinating companion-piece to the PC/Mac 'Falcon 4.0', a simulation of flying an F-16 over just such a conflict, with the same locations and technology.

Is it an unwritten rule that novels of this ilk always start off with an isolated commando raid?

14 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars This is the book to have!!!!!!!!!, June 13, 2002

By	K. Wyatt "ssintrepid" (St. Louis, MO United States) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

"Red Phoenix" is the authority in the world of "What if's" as far as the Korean theater of operations is concerned. The "puzzle palace" was probably wondering how he figured all this out. I'd originally read this amazing story when it first came out and was just floored by the realism, the character interactions and the author's knowledge of military operations. A few years later I was scheduled to go to South Korea on tdy and picked it up to read again. It was amazing to be reading this book and seeing a lot of the areas he'd talked about in the book, in person. To see the river's and the rivetments on the banks, to see the tank barricades all around Seoul and all the bases north of Seoul and be reading this book again at the same time. Absolutely amazing! Thank you very much to Larry Bond for an excellent book.