Royal Flush

I enjoyed the exchange between Carl and the queen of England. She clearly didn't understand that a covert operative would wish to keep his identity a secret. I just hope she doesn't invite him over for tea. :) As for Lady Carole Essex, aka Shillelagh, I'm thinking that if she had gotten help for her brain cancer, she would have remained on the side of good. I wonder why no one at COATUK knew about her illness.

Well it had to happen I suppose not all of the titles can be excellent or the series would still be in print.BUT this is not a title but maybe 2/3 of a title and that goes a long way toward making it ordinary.Why 2/3 of a title? Simply it only goes for 138 pages and then we have a deep background section detailing Mack's time in Vietnam during his first stint where a female newspaper reporter who arrives chafing at the bit to report a story regarding the baby killers etc. Well she nicks off from the camp and is taken prisoner by the VC. Mack takes off alone through the jungle and rescues her.Ho Hum I wonder who wrote those 44 pages of literary genius.The result of this means the reader is presented with a disjointed/shortened text trying to be a full book if that makes sense.Example the opening chapter involves a raid on a warehouse where 200 kilograms of drugs that have been purchased by the mafia from the IRA. The assault on the warehouse where some of the bad guys blow each other away actually goes for all of four pages.And Able Team after successive jaunts to the jungles fly over to sunny England to assist the British with a mole in their security network.From then on the crap starts where the British secret service which are universally regarded as good if not better than anything else in the world are depicted as bumbling fools and the Royal family are captured and taken hostage by the IRA terrorists.So as everything happens very quickly as we have a shortened book they are then saved in short order.I must admit I liked the scene where Lyons confronts the angry queen after the rescue who is demanding to know who he is and where he is from and what he says and does.But anyway no time to waste off we go there is a mole to find and yep we find the mole..........AND BUGGER ME you wouldn't have picked them in a mad fit........BULLSHIT there was blatant holes where fair dinkum if you didn't know who it was by 40-50 pages from the end you were asleep while reading this gem.The series up to this one has been fantastic but this is a shocker unfortunately.Very little to recommend with this title unfortunately.

This reads more like an actual "after action" report than a good novel. Sure , there is plenty of action, almost in every chapter, but there is no drama or tension since the characters are not developed. I probably finished this book in 1 hr . Also, I know Lyons is a bit " nuts" since this is right after Flors' death, but he is almost off the deep end in the last chapter. Save your time and skip this entry. However, the short Executioner story in the back , by Stephen Mertz, called EARLY FIRE, is pretty good. It's about Mack on his first 'Nam tour. A bleeding heart liberal anti-establishment reporter steals a jeep from camp, to get an expose' on the Nam war. Mack has to find her and rescue her from her VC captors. This was actually a better read than Royal Flush.

There were two things about this book that I really liked. The action during the terrorists' attack on the castle was good, and the story is about 45 pages shorter than most in the series ending on page 138. The story is preposterous. I know Able Team is the best at what they do. I just can't see the British government letting them take control of the operations in England. What were the SAS, Special Branch and the police doing? Well, nothing, actually. The characters aren't worth discussing except to say that the mystery identity of "the Shillelagh" is a cheat because the author refers to "he" in the narrative and it turns out to be a woman (as everyone will figure out anyway.) The last 40 pages of this book are taken up by a short story called "Early Fire" which features a pre-Executioner Sgt Mack Bolan in Vietnam rescuing a lady reporter who is convinced she knows all about the war. That description makes the story sound more interesting than it actually is. 3 stars for this mess.

This one went too fast to be anything great. It was tolerable.