By T. Michael Booth
Ballantine Books (1994)
Reviewed by Robert Thompson 4/26/94
I really had mixed feelings about this book. The story was interesting, although it has been done several times before. The characters were very one-dimensional, and although lots of bad things happen to good people, I found myself only moderately sympathetic, probably due to the lack of character development. It is easy to read, although far from the best written action - adventure novel of the decade.
Tim Reardon is a Green Beret- A Sergeant serving with the 10th Special Forces Group, Stationed in Germany, when he gets the news that his sister has been killed. He comes back for her funeral and finds out that she was murdered for unknown reasons in an area where illegal drugs are the norm. The cops think that it was just a case of bad luck or that she was an addict and deserved it. Tim knows that his sister was "a good girl" and tries to find out what really happened. He noses around a little, finds out a little bit of who and why, but before he can do much about it, has to return to his duties in Germany.
A few things more turn up, and an assassin is sent by the bad guys to eliminate Tim. It does not work, and Tim decides to put together his own team of current and ex-Special Forces guys to not only revenge his sister, but to make a financial profit by "liberating" several million dollars that the bad guys have stored up. In the pursuit of this objective Tim has to deal with or get around both good cops and bad cops, a wide variety of bad guys and a few innocent bystanders.
I found only a few things that I felt were technical errors, and these may have been the fault of the editors, not the writer. The tactics that the team used were certainly not what I would have used in the same mission- a lot more complicated and somewhat less professional than I would have expected for a group like that.
Now here is kind of a weird comment. This may not be a completely fictional work. It may have been at least partially autobiographical. T. Michael Booth shares a lot of characteristics with Tim Reardon, and even with what I saw as technical and tactical errors, it has the "ring of truth", and in the dedication of this book, one of the dedicatees has precisely the same name as the "good cop" in the book. Also, although the author's military service dates were well after mine, some of the "old veteran" S.F. characters in his book were very like some of my old associates either by name or by character or both.