It’s been a rough road with fiction lately. The last couple of items were kind of unfulfilling. So I was in the bookstore the other day looking for something cool, something fun, and something with some intelligence. I got in the ballpark with this Ted Bell fellow, but I don’t know if I’ll be back for more anytime soon.
This is the first book for Bell’s character Alex Hawke. Hawke is a Brit adventurer-type who spends most of his time drinking fine wines, traveling the globe on his private yacht, and saving the world from bad guys. He’s a descendant of real pirates so it’s no wonder that he also has a parrot named Sniper that spends a fair amount of time hanging out on his shoulder. Yeah, let’s bring up the Plausibility Continuum.
This is the second book in a row that falls way off the Plausibility Continuum, but I’m not going to beat up Ted Bell. His character Hawke is a little more endearing that Brad Thor’s Scott Harvath.
Let me give you a rundown of the story. I apologize if I sound flip. So Hawke witnesses his parent’s murder at age seven while on a Caribbean boat cruise. The perps were the hermanos de Herrera; three especially surly brothers. Well, fast forward about 30 years to current time where those same three brothers overthrow Castro and take over Cuba, purchase a Russian stealth sub with enough nukes to destroy the world, and plant a biological weapon inside a teddy bear owned by the daughter of the top guy at Guantanamo Bay.
How fitting is it that Hawke not only gets to save the world from these three brothers, but also gets to avenge his parents death? Ummm, very fitting, I guess, in the world of Ted Bell.
It was fun at times, but left me pretty empty. I’m frustrated with the international thriller/terror drama so I don’t know why I keep buying them. I keep thinking I’m going to get a Jason Bourne-style international chase and brawl, but it ain’t happening. Maybe this genre just doesn’t work in writing for me anymore. Maybe I should just rent thriller videos and spend my fictional reading time on mysteries, dramas, satire, and sci-fi. I’m going to think long and hard about this in a few weeks when I do my year end reading review.