Clear Shot

Another excellent title by this author. Pol goes back home to recover from his thigh wound and there is some good reading on his family and his background. He does some moonlighting as an advisor to a movie crew (who have deep and dark secrets folks let me tell you) on how to storm a guarded structure and is subject to one of the best cons/stings you could think of. Again the ending of the title was terrific reading. You wouldn't want to be one of Pol's sisters but as they have both taken a hammering now.

This book doesn't set the world on fire with blazing action, but it is entertaining enough, with decent action scenes interesting locations, and a look at Pol's family, with his dad getting into the firefight! A pretty good Able Team worth reading and it makes you wonder if Lao Ti was gonna die in this one.

A clever premise and well-executed -- pardon the pun, but there are some great-if-gruesome executions here. Claudette Simms came across as a full-blooded femme fatale and not just some cardboard cutout. Renauld tends to dance around the nuts-and-bolts when it comes to shootouts, but seeing as it's easy to get that stuff from other writers, this came across as a nice change of pace from the usual Able Team. I think somebody wrote that he was a television writer and it shows because the story is well-paced and structured with a good idea for visual details. I did wonder, though, why Pol's sister suddenly dropped off the map after her prominent appearance only a couple books before (Firecross), but I guess it's hard to keep up continuity with these series sometimes.

Yes, I bashed Renauld in some other reviews but I found this to be very enjoyable. Not on par with early Ables, but it had some good shootouts, plus a close one with Lao Ti.

This one was a particularly good Able novel. Not only did Renauld give us a good look at Blancanales' life and background (between this, Cajun Angel, and some other Ables, it seems Pol is Ron's favorite member of Able), but it gave us a set of villains I so wanted to see die slowly and painfully. Nan and Veronica's deaths were uncommonly upsetting and moving to me, and I wish that Claudette hadn't died with a headshot, the one weak point of the novel.A gutshot with a .45, like at the end of I, The Jury, would have been more appropriate for Claudette, and the manners of Able Team.