Blood Of The Earth by Don PendletonMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
Published in 1999, this is the first of the "newer" Mack Bolan books I have read. I tried and honestly enjoyed a handful of the OG Mack Bolan books from 1972 and 1973 (books 11-15), so I crossed my fingers and jumped ahead to #246, hoping and expecting opposite things. It defied my expectations, though, and I think this book is even better that the old ones. To keep the series going, Mack Bolan had to broaden out from attacking the Mafia, and now he works for the government, taking on bad guys around the world. In this one, he's on a Pacific island where oil is discovered, protecting US interests from deadly guys working for shady Japanese and French investors.
There are a bunch of these books, literally hundreds, across a range of related series, and as a result they are more or less like episodes in a long-running tv show, or maybe more like comic books, coming out 1 or 2 times a month. You don't expect it to be cinematic, and it's not. Nor do you expect it to sound like literary fiction, and it doesn't. But it is well plotted and conceived, following the norms and expectations of the genre, reading something like an unknown but pretty decent action movie buried deep in Netflix. And it is well written, with great pacing and strong action scenes, as it is penned by someone who makes their living doing this, someone who knows how to make installment #246 in a long-running series somehow interesting and exciting and worth coming back to over a series of days. I give the author a lot of credit. I'd be psyched to have his career.
This keeps my experiment with pulp fiction going, and I've got a few more coming in the mail that I'm super curious about. So we'll see. I'll keep everyone up to date.
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