The first Stony Man from Newton, and it was better than I expected. The book starts off with some mini missions Bolan, AT, and PF are on independently. After these are over and they all gather together at the farm, that is when the story really begins. This is a standard drug smuggler operation takedown adventure, involving a number of high profile dealers and their cohorts in politics and law enforcement. The settings were diverse as expected for a Stony Man, Panama, Columbia, Cuba, Jamaica, and Bahamas as the teams were spread out among these locations.
A large cast of villains are introduced around pages 74-78, and I would recommend bookmarking these, as it will help in keeping track of who is who and what role they have in the story. For me, I am not the greatest fan of the Stony Man format, preferring the older independent series. Having too many heroes and villains in too many places makes it difficult to follow the narrative, too often I find myself flipping back pages to remember where scenes left off, after shifting between all the different viewpoints.
Overall, I thought Newton told a good story, with a few good action scenes here and there, my favorite being Encizo and James' scene when James gets caught at a fence, some great action there. While there was not as much action as I expected, I thought it was fine because there was plenty of room for the story and characters to develop. My only gripe for this book which I'm deducting a star for is there are a couple of cut and paste scenes in here from Bolan's perspective. The sniper scene was included, a carbon copy of many seen in the Executioner series, and later another girl hostage with Bolan going from faction to faction with the return the girl or I won't stop routine.
It was nice to see the Stony Man teams again, AT and PF were written very well, I thought, and Grimaldi had a nice role in the book as well, all in all I liked the book, worth the read in my opinion.
Oh what a disappointment I've already read this.
Hang on no I haven't ?
Oh yes I have <sigh> here we go again.
A major drug pipeline is pumping huge amounts of drugs into the US and the Stony Man operatives are instructed to shut it down.
Bolan is sent to Panama as part of the operation where he discovers numerous cartels operating. He decides on an UNUSUAL! tactic where if he can rattle some cages and kill a few of both sides maybe they would start fighting between themselves thereby reducing their numbers saving him the trouble.
Could this actually work you may say to yourself?
Well it starts on the roof of an adjacent building where with a sniper rifle he takes out a few guys of one of the groups. Following this he attacks locations of both groups and bugger me they actually go for it and think their rivals are behind the attacks and come out swinging.
Amazing who would have thought?
So the title plods on and on, this author's first crack at Stony Man and whilst he has Bolan down pat and Able Team pretty good as well he fails dismally with Phoenix Force.
But I thought to myself well at least there is no female hostage who has to be rescued until I reached about 3/4 through the title AND GRRRRRR.
No worries though folks she is rescued safe and well.
Imagine that?
Very ordinary re-read here.
Oh god this is the defination of boring. The entire novel seems strictly by the numbers.
It also shows how easily a Stony Man novel can be so mediocre.
The problam is that our heroes are on 4 different missions - tied together and not one story minus Mack's are indepth.
This is written like a Mack novel with him in Panama and it should have stayed there. Katz storyline is almost nonexistant, AT well at times dumb and the Rafe/Cal in Cuba was the only interesting storyline besides Macks.
Lets face it Mack had about as many pages as AT/Katz and Jack's put together. Plus some of Rafe/Cals.
Three missions in a SM novel is way more the enough. Actually Mack's should be equal to one of the other missions. If they want to make it mainly a Mack story then it shouldn't be a SM novel.
The villians were kind of good but I swaer they came from central casting how often have I read about Columbian drug lords written exactly the same way or SA curropt politicians/military same character - different name. This novel showed just retread villians characters.
I also got the feeling that Newton sometimes doesn't get a feel for the SM characters in the early novels. He did this also in SM1 whe it really was a Mack novel with AT and PF thrown in for support.
Mediocre at best.
The President of the US has decided it's time to end a drug pipeline into the States. Without enough legal authority, he calls on the Stony Man commandos.
And therein lies the first of the flaws with this book. Although there is not enough legal information to arrest or indict, there are full dossiers on every single member of the drug chain. Also, while not enough info exists to get a conviction, there is enough for the president to issue death sentences for all concerned.
The insanity doesn't stop there, however. How about an invasion of Cuba, by 2 men? Or a US fighter jet making an assault on the citizen of a foreign country, violating that countries airspace and sovereign status? All this, without a case that will hold up in court.
"Stony Man VII" did have some good battle scenes. A bridge assault in Panama was well-written, and a subtle plot twist where an ex-con sent up by Lyons almost does in an undercover operation was excellent. Unfortuantely, too many ludicrous premises makes this book so bad as to not be worth reading.
