Shadow Warriors

First the good points: Carl Lyons shags a 19 year old university student. (I think that is good, right?) This is a big story contained inside a small novel and really needed to be given room to breath in a larger novel, but this was written in the days before Stony Man novels appeared. The bad guys are a cabal of generals and admirals who want to turn our country into a fascist military run paradise under the pretense that civilians just can't hack it. A senator learns some small detail of the plot then passes it onto a friend at the CIA who contacts Able Team. The first big action sequence is when Able Team escape from the Wolf's Tooth base and are pursued through the desert. It is excellent reading. The second action sequence is the main assault on Wolf's Tooth and is equally excellent although it suffers from the page count. Again a bigger novel would have been better. The characters are surprisingly well rounded for such a short novel. I actually liked the CIA guy. And extra kudos for the regret and sadness that Able Team suffered when they had to kill US soldiers in battle. Very well done. But the bad..... It seems that everybody and their dog knows about Able Team, knows their names, knows what they do and know where they live. Although Stony Man Farm is barely mentioned in the book. So much for a secret organisation. Even a journalist knew all about them. For the final battle Able Team ring around to gather a team of mercenaries together run by a Colonel or Captain Black - the rank kept changing. So what happened to the Farm? What happened to Phoenix Force or Mack Bolan? The situation is serious but Able Team cannot be bothered to phone home. It seems that the author was totally unaware of their existence. Also irritating was that Carl Lyons seemed to morph from being in the police to being in the military. A pet peeve was that the author kept going on about the Vietnam war. On and on it went, and every character in the book apart from the university girl had been there, skinning Vietcong alive. I get that this book was written about fifteen years after the American military retreat, but it really did not need to be mentioned on every other page. It did drag the story down a little.

I quite enjoyed this as the plot is chilling if you imagine what if it actually happened. Terrific action scenes throughout an excellent plot hatched by the generals of the different armed forces. What is very well written is the dilemma's faced by the Team as their oponents are not terrorists or Russians or anything they normally come up against they are members of the armed forces of the United States simply doing their duty and following orders. Time and time again the members of the team hesitate and offer surrender options and all of these offers are rejected until except one AND what happens blew me away. I also thought the start was much better than the finish of the title but it's certainly worth a read.

This book started out like it was going to be a good one. Until the author started on his habit of repeating sentences. There was plenty of action, and the plot was interesting, but the story didn't work out as well as it could have, as well as being bogged down by those annoying repeated sentences. Also,the characters in the story suffered from cookie-cutter personalities, as a result of this problem. Able Team seemed to become more and more as just a cog in an army toward the end of the novel, rather than the independant team they should have been. The book had potential, and I liked the conspiracy of the generals, and the Harwood character was well done. But too many problems here, so a 4 rating is the most I can give this novel. Very disappointing.

One of the best Able Team books that I've read yet.

Ken Rose isn't the best Able writer, but this one was entertaining enough. Had some good shootout scenes.