Days of Rage by Brad Taylor

Published by Dutton on July 15, 2014

Just when I thought Brad Taylor was running out of gas, telling a story that was too similar to other Taskforce novels, he decided to shake up the series. I won't say what happens, but it triggers the dark rage that Pike Logan thought his team member and lover Jennifer had tamed. The last half of the novel is intense.

Two storylines weave together. One involves Russia's FSB, which wants to send a Nigerian terrorist to execute a plan that is intended to damage the United States. The plan is farfetched but I guess I can accept that the FSB might believe it would work.  When the FSB creates problems for the Taskforce, Pike Logan and his usual team members travel to Bulgaria to learn what the Nigerian is planning.

The other storyline involves Russian intelligence secrets that Mossad is trying to buy. A flash drive holding those secrets contains information that might be embarrassing to the United States government. Pike's team is redirected to recover the flash drive before Mossad can get it. As usual, Pike has his own agenda.

Pike pursuing an unauthorized mission of his own is beginning to feel like a formula but, so far, it is a successful formula. And as noted above, Taylor shakes up the formula with a surprising plot twist that forces Pike to realize how much he depends on Jennifer for a sense of balance while forcing Jennifer to realize how living a violent life is changing her in ways she fears.

As always, Taylor has a realistic and nuanced view of his heroes and villains. Taylor understands that the Taskforce would be called the "secret police" in other nations. Days of Rage illustrates our "confusing new world" in which allies and enemies are often difficult to distinguish. The tension between the interests of Mossad and those of the United States, as well as a debate about whether endless cycles of killing actually keep people safe, provide some of the novel's most interesting moments. Taylor's point of view is a refreshing break from the simplistic worldviews offered by too many thriller writers. I also appreciate the moral center that Jennifer brings to the story. Of course, the high tech gadgetry, fistfights, and chases are fun too.

RECOMMENDED

The Polaris Protocol by Brad Taylor

Published by Dutton Adult on January 14, 2014

Reading a Taskforce novel is an adrenalin rush. While that could be said of many action novels, Brad Taylor's Taskforce novels have the additional virtue of being intelligent. Taylor has a clear, cliché-free writing style that helps the story move swiftly. Plentiful action scenes contribute to the pace, but Taylor avoids the overdone and over-the-top nonsense that pervades so many action novels. The plots are farfetched but plausible enough for fun escapist fiction. I keep waiting for Taylor to stumble, given the speed at which he is churning out Taskforce novels, but the quality continues to be consistent.

The Polaris Protocol begins with the Taskforce chasing a bad guy in Turkmenistan while different bad guys in Mexico are messing with the GPS system. The reader knows that it's only a matter of time before the Taskforce takes on the new threat to national security. As is always true in a Taskforce novel, everything that can go wrong does ... until the end, of course, when Pike Logan and his team clean up the mess. It's a formula, but it works.

Another part of Taylor's successful formula has been: Pike wants to do something to defeat a menace; Pike is ordered not to do it; Pike does it anyway, saving the world (or at least some part of it) in the process. Taylor varies that formula a bit in The Polaris Protocol. This time Pike is giving the orders and Jennifer is disregarding them. As always, Taylor strikes a workable balance between action and character development, while the addition of friction between Pike and Jennifer adds interest to the story.

The friction arises because Jennifer's brother Jack, a journalist investigating a Mexican drug cartel, accidentally discovers a bigger story that leads to his kidnapping. Jennifer goes to his aid, abandoning the Turkmenistan mission (with Pike's consent), which cheeses off some of her Taskforce teammates. Knuckles is more cheesed at Pike than at Jennifer, particularly when he learns that Pike and Jennifer have been slipping between the sheets during their off-duty hours. That subplot has been developing over the course of the series and it's starting to pay dividends as Jack recognizes the division of his loyalty to Jennifer and to the Taskforce and its mission.

An old nemesis of Pike resurfaces in The Polaris Protocol, but the most interesting character is a different psychopathic killer. Remorseless killers are standard fare in thrillers, but Taylor fashions this one with subtlety. I'm not sure I quite buy the notion of a philosophical psychopath, but he's more entertaining than the usual mindless grunt-and-kill evildoer. Character creation is one of Taylor's skills, particularly his ability to depict both good guys and bad guys in a nuanced way. Pike engages in appalling behavior at the novel's end for a reason that seems justifiable to Pike (covering up all the laws he's broken in this and earlier novels) and perhaps to the reader, although the notion that good guys obey the law is out the window in these novels. Pike muses that Americans want a black-and-white world in which people and governments are either good or evil, but that isn't the world in which we live. Pike understands that and, fortunately for his readers, so does Taylor. None of his good guys are entirely good, just as his bad guys are not entirely evil. That's one reason I enjoy these novels.

RECOMMENDED

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

The Widow's Strike by Brad Taylor

Published by Dutton on July 16, 2013

When writers churn out novels with the speed that Brad Taylor has been adding to the Pike Logan series, there's usually a noticeable decline in quality from book to book. Surprisingly, Taylor's books are getting better. The Widow's Strike might be the best of them. It's exciting, intelligent, action-filled, and fast-moving. The story is plausible. The characters continue to evolve. They're forced to make tough decisions, the sort of decisions that have emotional consequences, and Taylor never makes the mistake of posturing his characters as robotic superhumans who are unaffected by their work. They aren't infallible, they second-guess their decisions, they have regrets. Taylor's ability to humanize his action heroes sets him apart from many other authors working in the same genre.

On loan to a Taskforce team that isn't his own, Knuckles has managed to get himself jailed in Thailand, a situation that Pike soon remedies. Since Pike and his team are already in Thailand, they're given a mission in Bangkok. The Taskforce target this time is General Malik Musavi of Iran's Qud Force. Although the Taskforce isn't certain what he's up to, the reader knows he's trying to obtain a mutated version of bird flu (the infamous H5N1 virus) to use as a biological weapon. That's been done before, but Taylor twists the story enough to make a familiar plot seem reasonably fresh.

A connecting plot thread concerns a Chechen suicide bomber. Pike and his team chase down clues that are spread across Thailand, Hong Kong, and Singapore before returning to the United States. Back home, a civilian member of the Taskforce's oversight council needs some oversight of his own.

As always, I'm impressed by Taylor's ability to get into the minds of Pike's enemies, to portray them as reasoning human beings rather than stereotypes of evil. And as he has in other novels, Taylor goes out of his way to expose the dull-witted intolerance of certain Americans who view foreign affairs in simplistic terms. But here, too, Taylor avoids stereotyping, taking care to point out that not all Americans are xenophobes or religious bigots.

The Widow's Strike follows the formula that drove the earlier Pike Logan novels: Pike's Taskforce team is sent on a mission with strict orders not to interfere with the target or do anything conspicuous; Pike decides the orders aren't useful and disregards them in favor of action; Pike's team prevents a worldwide catastrophe. It's a reliable formula, and while it might get old at some point, Taylor uses here with predictable but fun results.

RECOMMENDED

Enemy of Mine by Brad Taylor

Published by Dutton on January 15, 2013 

Enemy of Mine does what an action novel needs to do: it delivers action. Along the way, it tells a surprisingly intelligent, carefully plotted story.

The prologue to Enemy of Mine begins with a nightmare (always a bad start to a novel) as Pike Logan dreams about the murder of his wife and child four years earlier. The main story begins with the assassination of an investigator who had gathered evidence implicating the Syrian government and Hezbollah in the 2005 death of Lebanon's prime minister. The assassin (a freelance terrorist known as the Ghost) then accepts an assignment to kill the American envoy to upcoming peace negotiations between the Palestinian Authority and Israel. A competing freelance assassin, an American named Lucas Kane but known by the code name Infidel, turns up to add spice to the plot. Pike encountered Infidel in One Rough Man.

Pike's ultimate mission, and that of the counter-terrorism Taskforce to which he is assigned, is to prevent the envoy's assassination. When they aren't with Pike, other members of the Taskforce come into focus, particularly Jennifer, an anthropologist who kicks butt when she isn't educating the other Taskforce members about world history. Knuckles and Decoy will also be familiar to series fans, while a new guy named Brett joins the team. Pike and Jennifer, however, are the only characters who gain new depth in this novel.

Occasionally the story spotlights Col. Kurt Hale, who commands the Taskforce from Washington D.C. Hale sits on an oversight committee that answers to the president (the only elected official on the committee). Since the Taskforce operates "outside the bounds of U.S. law" (it doesn't notify Congress or obtain Congressional approval before kidnapping or assassinating its targets), Hale and Pike and everyone else on the Taskforce, as well as the president and everyone on the oversight committee, is by definition a criminal. A reader needs to accept this unlikely premise (at least, one would hope it's unlikely) in order to enjoy the story. Since modern thrillers are almost always built on unlikely foundations, I rolled with it.

The main plot is cunning, bringing to mind (without overtly stating) the familiar Arabic proverb, "the enemy of my enemy is my friend." Of course, sometimes the enemy of your enemy is also your enemy. A couple of assassination schemes that unfold during the course of the novel are quite clever. The last quarter of the novel, after the main plot has wound down, seems like padding but it's enjoyable padding. A key subplot depends upon a wildly improbable coincidence that is easily forgiven since it drives the action at the end of the novel.

The story moves at a brisk pace. Brad Taylor's prose is straightforward but Enemy of Mine is about story, not style. The story is entertaining, although some events are predictable. Pike gets into bar fights to prove what a tough guy he is, just as he did in The Callsign. He risks his team and his cover to save a girl he doesn't know, after being ordered to cease operations, simultaneously proving his heroism and independence. In fact, Pike frequently disregards orders and never suffers any consequences because he always turns out to be right. Knuckles gives us the usual detailed description of the care a sniper takes to fire an accurate long-distance shot. The oversight committee is predictably bureaucratic in its refusal to trust the judgment of Taskforce members in the field. None of these scenes are bad, but they've all been done many times before.

Taylor has a more nuanced view of the world than some action novelists. He acknowledges that terrorists can be intelligent, that they do not share a unified ideology, and that the differing motivations of terrorist organizations lead them to pursue conflicting goals. Although Pike obviously disagrees with it, Taylor presents the Lebanese perspective on Hezbollah and the 2006 war with refreshing honesty, while Hale recognizes that there is a difference between the Palestinian Authority and Hamas. Unlike most action novel heroes, Pike knows that using torture as an interrogation technique is more likely to produce lies than truth. And unlike the vigilante "heroes" that populate so many thrillers, Pike has moral reservations about revenge killing, creating a dilemma when he experiences an overwhelming desire for revenge.

In short, this is an impressive action novel with a solid plot that reflects an unusually sophisticated worldview. On top of that, it's fun.

RECOMMENDED