Black Flag by Brad Taylor and Blood Brothers by James Rollins and Rebecca Cantrell

The trend of offering a short story in digital format to promote an upcoming series novel (a excerpt of which is packaged with the short story) creates buzz for the novel and a bit of extra income -- or so writers and their publishers hope. Two stories that follow that trend are reviewed here.

"Black Flag" by Brad Taylor

Published by Dutton on November 19, 2013

Avast, me bucko! Arrrr! No, it isn't Talk Like a Pirate Day, but "Black Flag" put me in the mood. The latest Taskforce story is about ... you guessed it ... pirates. Unlikely though it seems, Knuckles commits his team members to help search for Blackbeard's treasure. Of course, the treasure hunters who want to hire the business that the Taskforce uses as a cover are not your ordinary adventurers who spend their time diving for doubloons.

"Black Flag" promotes The Polaris Protocol, the fifth novel in Brad Taylor's Taskforce series. Taylor's short stories have steadily improved, and "Black Flag" is the most imaginative of the ones he's produced. There isn't much that's new here in terms of character development, but that's to be expected in a between-novels story. There is, however, plenty of action, the pirate theme lends itself to some tongue-in-cheek fun, and (as is typical of Taylor) the story is smart and fast-moving.

RECOMMENDED

"Blood Brothers" by James Rollins and Rebecca Cantrell

Published ditigally by William Morrow Impulse on October 22, 2013

"Blood Brothers" is part of the Order of the Sanguines series, which began with The Blood Gospel. It promotes the second book in the series, Innocent Blood.

Arthur Crane finds an orchid in his apartment and flashes back to 1968 when, as a reporter in Great Britain who traveled to San Francisco to write about the death of a British folksinger, he saw a poster bearing the picture of Christian, a relative who was almost like a brother as Arthur was growing up. He didn't find Christian that day, but he did learn that the folksinger's killer left an orchid on his body. A pattern soon developed -- the victim receives an orchid in the morning and is killed twelve hours later, another orchid left on the body -- leading Arthur to dub the murderer The Orchid Killer. Arthur knew things weren't going well for him when he found an orchid on his typewriter. The story moves on from there until Arthur returns to the present and his second orchid.

Some aspects of "Blood Brothers" are unoriginal, including the inevitable "secret order buried deep within the Catholic Church," and Rollins/Cantrell are not subtle in their character development. Still, the story moves quickly, the setting is described in convincing detail, and action scenes are more plausible than is common in thrillers (at least if you discount the fang-like teeth that both good guys and bad guys are sporting). I liked "Blood Brothers" enough to recommend it to the legions of James Rollins fans but I wouldn't recommend it to readers who are anxious to find something new and different. Nothing in the story convinced me that the world needs another series of books about an ancient secret society.

RECOMMENDED WITH RESERVATIONS