As I am deep in some thicker books which I am not really enthusiastic about reading, so I picked up this bit of pulp for enjoyment, kind of like having a bite of the sweet corn whilst eating the liver. I picked this book up in 2012 at Hooked on Books–a year later, I would really pad out my collection of the books in the Executionerverse, which includes the next title in the Able Team series, but who knows how long it will take me to get to it.
Able Team is three of the members of the Stony Farm team that helped Mack Bolan, the Executioner, out on occasion. Note that the Stony Farm series is a separate line in the Executionerverse, and who knows when I will get to them–since I finished the last of the Executioner books I accumulated in 2022, I’ve been slow to really delve into the men’s adventure paperbacks. Maybe I’ve gotten old and switched to Westerns. Anyway.
So Able Team is sent to El Salvador to hunt for a guy who has eluded their grasp in the United States, a big drug dealer or what have you, not part of the government but a powerful man with his own private army nevertheless. It’s a story ripped from today’s headlines, where today is almost forty years ago. The El Salvador civil war was going on. Is it still? Maybe. Central and South America, neh? Although they find help from various rebel groups with their own agenda, they find that the hard site is too hard for their small band, and the bad man has gone to a meet-up in Honduras with other similar fellows from across Central and South America who are looking to bring about a Fourth Reich. It’s a story ripped from today’s pulp fiction forty years ago.
You know, strangely enough, the plot is not necessarily that dated. Not that there’s a great swell of Naziism, but it never really went away in thrillers, did it?
At any rate, it’s an ensemble piece with characters who are almost ciphers, just bundles of characteristics, whose characterization, I guess, takes place over time. The book alludes to events in previous books, and the bad guy gets away again, which means I can guess what Able Team is doing in their next book. Which I’m not sure when I will get to. Unless, of course, I dawdle in the thick books stacked beside my chair for any length of time.
