Quick comparison: Chris Ryan is not half as good as Andy McNab. This book reads like it has been dictated to an average typist by a fourteen year old. It is, almost literally, only half there; there are numerous places where action is built up, reaches a climax (word used under advisement), and then just stops, as if the author has run out of breath. Worse still, the half that is there conveys scant details, and no emotions, not even the hardened ones of an SAS soldier.
MI5 wants an al-Qaeda boat carrying money to be laudered to be sunk, the money being allowed to the ex-SAS et cetera men as payment for this deniable mission. Then MI5 want the men dead, and leave the al-Qaeda brigade to their revenge so they will find out who the ring-leader is, so one by one the soldiers are popped off (this is obvious a third of the way through the book except you are not supposed to be able to work that out until the end; the hero comes across as stupid in the later two-thirds of the book as he makes all the expected wrong moves). In the final scene, the hero holds a gun to the head of the MI5 agent, then two more agents sneak up from nowhere and hold a gun to his head, then his girlfriend shows up with her brother (who was supposed to have been killed halfway through). There is a silly shoot-out and everyone goes away happily ever after.
Load of rubbish. |
