Freedom Strike

A fair read this is another title which is a middle of the road book. Whilst it reads okay it just seems to fail to deliver the killer blow which would make it a very good book. Not sure about Mack stirring two spoons of powdered cream into his instant coffee though ?

The South African setting for this entry was interesting, but overall, it seemed a bit of a letdown...solid, not extraordinary. The good points included the various factions battling for supremacy making for an interesting amount of conflict, with the vile white supremacists, the Zulu radicals and the street thugs giving Bolan enough enemies to shake things up. Sonda in her role as conlicted enemy/ally for Bolan was also an interesting twist. The actions scenes were good, and Bolan certainly lived up to the name The Executioner in this one, with a no-prisoners attitude sometimes lacking in some novels from this period. The bad...well again, I have to question Bolan bringing allies along on blitzes when they are not really necessary and thus put into harm's way unnecessarily. Mack is a living one-man army corp, a soldier par excellance...to bring Preston along, despite his "4 months experience" in Desert Storm doesn't make sense to me... All in all, a good entry in the series...not outstanding, but well done enough to make me look forward to this author's other installments.

This novel deals with the struggle between blacks and whites in South Africa. Bolan is sent to protect the new black president and at the same time take out some white supremacist gangs in the area. North writes an entertaining action story, although with a large cast of characters, you might need a scorecard to keep track of them all. Lots of different gangs and their various allegiences make for some complicated reading, especially if you read the book over a few days. But it kept my interest and Bolan had some good allies and great blitzes against the gang-owned warehouses. Preston, the embassy man, was more and more a feature in the novel and provided valuable assistance to Bolan. Sonda was another main character who was the focal point of the story. This book has an interesting storyline with some by-the-numbers action sequences. A few things dropped my rating down a bit with some bits here and there that didn't seem to add up right. For one, I thought that it was too pat to have Preston constantly providing Bolan with all the info he needed. One scene in particular confused me. I couldn't figure out how Preston beat Bolan to Sonda's rescue when Bolan was the only one there and was tossing grenades into the building. There were no other entrances to the building. And Bolan had talked to Preston on the phone before he went there, Bolan was closer to the building. How did Preston get in there? Another item that didn't seem right was Sonda herself. Too much of is she a good guy or a bad guy thing going on in the story. Normaly this would be something to keep the reader guessing, but in this case there just didn't seem to be any consistency in her character. Another thing was Desmond. He seemed to be the main bad guy early in the novel, but he kind of disappeared after a while. Later on Bolan gets invited to his party. Preston supposedly got the invitation, but there was no apparent connection between Preston and Desmond. All in all a fairly good book that had even more potential, but for some questionable plot threads. A strong 7.

I found other David North books to be more enjoyable. This one seemed to jump around quite frequently, but the action scenes were plentiful enough so that it was fairly decent overall. Had a good, tense finale.