It's a No From Me

Devil's Army by Don Pendleton
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

I sometimes enjoy these old-fashioned super-violent books, but this one is just dumb.

North Koreans and Iraqis (this was written in the early 2000's, apparently while some people still believed Iraq had WMDs) are teaming up to do something in the US. The reason they're working together makes no sense and really doesn't work. At one point, a bunch of bad guys (the North Koreans) are killing the other bad guys (some jihadist Iraqis who were supposedly their partners in the plot) somewhere in NY, and Bolan is going in behind them, attacking both sets of guys. It's a very unsatisfying scene, and it goes on. The overall plot doesn't really make sense, except for kidnapping scientists and their families. The story should have followed that stuff.

The last 20 pages, Mack Bolan invades the bad guys' lair, and then it reads like other Executioner books I've enjoyed.

They're a lot like Rambo or John Wick when they're written well, and more like random pages of several comic books jammed together when they're written badly. The first 200 pages of this book were bad.

It's the first in a trilogy, and I kept reading in case I'd feel like getting the other two books. I'm not gonna.

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