Ridiculous fun, like Lethal Weapon flicks.
Marcinko takes on Homeland Security to show how far from secure the homeland is.
Since the first two Rogue Warrior entries, the series has wobbled, dipping into mouthy action comedy and wholesale invention. Happily, Number 11 makes a strong recovery from its predecessor, the demented bloodbath Violence of Action (2002). Since author/protagonist Marcinko’s real-life firm, SOS Temps, may have done some work for Homeland Security, the reader can vaguely relate to his flimflam here. Just in case, he and co-author DeFelice wheel out detail-specific hardware and armaments to support his thrills—and plenty of buffed-up female troops to keep Demo Dick happy. Here, Richard Armstead of the Homeland Security Office contracts for Marcinko’s Red Cell to wake up the country. As if leading a terrorist team, Demo Dick starts by taking over a train hauling several tankers of cyanide gas through Kansas. During this activity, the team finds a real satchel bomb wired to a railroad bridge and a headless, handless corpse under the bridge. Next they take out a hospital in Des Moines, showing that it would be easy prey. Well, his Red Cell team earlier got plenty of attention when it “blew up” Air Force One and some nuclear submarines. But Armstead is furious at Marcinko for literally terrorizing the country, starting with Kansas, Iowa and a massive truck depot in Illinois. Says Demo Dick, “If you’re going to have a war on terror—HAVE A FUCKING WAR ON TERROR!” A motorcyclist shadowing Marcinko gets chewed up by an Amtrak train, a gruesome death, admits our hero, but the people after him want to kill nasty, too. In Manhattan, to save female agent Brandy, he foils a bank robbery in progress, personally killing two punks. Soon, he kills two more just as a Muslim suicide bomber blows up a shopping mall. Then the real terrorists head for vengeance in Las Vegas and Boom! Boom!
Ridiculous fun, like Lethal Weapon flicks.Pub Date: June 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-7434-2247-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2005
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Magnificent writing, nonetheless, makes the best case yet for putting McCarthy on a pedestal just below the one occupied by...
Almost as frustrating as it is commanding, McCarthy’s ninth (and first since the completion of his Border Trilogy: Cities of the Plain, 1998, etc.) is a formidable display of stunningly written scenes that don’t quite cohere into a fully satisfying narrative.
It’s a bleak chronicle of murder, revenge and implacable fate pocked with numerous echoes of McCarthy’s great Blood Meridian (1985). Here, the story’s set in 1980 in southern Texas near the Mexican border, where aging Sheriff Bell, a decorated WWII veteran, broods heroically over the territory he’s sworn to protect, while—in a superb, sorrowful monologue—acknowledging the omnipresence of ineradicable evil all around him. Then the focus trains itself on Vietnam vet Llewellyn Moss, a hunter who stumbles upon several dead bodies, a stash of Mexican heroin and more than $2 million in cash that he absconds with. The tale then leaps among the hunted (Moss), an escaped killer (Anton Chigurh), whose crimes include double-crossing the drug cartel from which the money was taken, the Army Special Forces freelancer (Carson Wells) hired by druglords and—in dogged pursuit of all the horrors spawned by their several interactions—the intrepid, however flawed and guilty, stoical Sheriff Bell: perhaps the most fully human and sympathetic character McCarthy has ever created. The justly praised near-biblical style, an artful fusion of brisk declarative sentences and vivid, simple images, confers horrific intensity on the escalating violence and chaos, while precisely dramatizing the sense of nemesis that pursues and punishes McCarthy’s characters (scorpions in a sealed bottle). But this eloquent melodrama is seriously weakened by its insufficiently varied reiterated message: “if you were Satan . . . tryin to bring the human race to its knees, what you would probably come up with is narcotics.”
Magnificent writing, nonetheless, makes the best case yet for putting McCarthy on a pedestal just below the one occupied by William Faulkner.Pub Date: July 25, 2005
ISBN: 0-375-40677-8
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2005
IN THE NEWS
Box handles this foolproof formula with complete assurance, keeping the pot at a full boil until the perfunctory,...
The creator of Wyoming Fish and Game Warden Joe Pickett (Breaking Point, 2013, etc.) works the area around Yellowstone National Park in this stand-alone about a long-haul trucker with sex and murder on his mind.
The Lizard King, as he calls himself, normally targets lot lizards—prostitutes who work the parking lots adjacent to the rest stops that dot interstate highways. But he’s more than happy to move up to a higher class of victim when he runs across the Sullivan sisters. Danielle, 18, and Gracie, 16, are supposed to be driving from their mother’s home in Denver to their father’s in Omaha, but Danielle has had the bright idea of heading instead to Bozeman, Mont., to visit her boyfriend, Justin Hoyt. Far from home, their whereabouts known to only a few people, the girls are the perfect victims even before they nearly collide with the Lizard King’s rig and Danielle flips him off. Hours later, very shortly after he’s caught up with them in the depths of Yellowstone and done his best to eradicate every trace of his abduction, Justin, worried that Danielle refused his last phone call, tells his father that something bad has happened. Cody Hoyt, an investigator for the Lewis and Clark County Sheriff’s Department, is already having a tough day: At the insistence of his crooked boss, Sheriff Tubman, his longtime student and new partner, Cassandra Dewell, has just caught him planting evidence in an unrelated murder, and he’s been suspended from his job. If he’s lost his badge, though, Cody’s got plenty of time on his hands to drive downstate and meet with State Trooper Rick Legerski, the ex-husband of his dispatcher’s sister, to talk about what to do next. And so the countdown begins.
Box handles this foolproof formula with complete assurance, keeping the pot at a full boil until the perfunctory, anticlimactic and unsatisfactory ending.Pub Date: July 30, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-312-58320-0
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Minotaur
Review Posted Online: July 6, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2013
BOOK TO SCREEN
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