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This book isn’t a complete waste of time, which was the wish I expressed in the report for Twisted Path<\/em><\/a>. Mack Bolan doesn’t smoke a cigarette, for example.<\/p>\nThe plot: Someone is killing off the Saudi royal family, and it looks like the Iranians and the Russians are working together to install a puppet monarch on the Saudi throne. Bolan goes to Saudi Arabia to uncover the plot, and it leads him and Grimaldi into an assault on a compound at Mecca.<\/p>\n
It’s an odd duck of a book; I was first pretty satisfied with it, but then the set pieces in the plot were kind of clumsy. I don’t know how much to ascribe to the writer or to the people who prepared the plots. But the set pieces don’t really seem like they’d be a good idea to advance to the next, and then Bolan charges in with guns blazing. So the writing was okay, but the set pieces were faulty.<\/p>\n
Although the book contained a couple of mistakes:<\/p>\n
The men were Arabs, probably with the ayatollahs–Iranians in Western dress carrying compact Russian automatic weapons.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Iranians are not Arabic. As I was reading, I wondered if I could tell Arabs from Persians and Semites based on appearance. Maybe, maybe not. But in plain text and history, I can.<\/p>\n
Also, at the very end, they crash land a plane that has run out of fuel, and it explodes<\/em>. Which is one of the nice things about an airplane running out of fuel: The explosions are much lesser.<\/p>\n
Still, not a bad entry, but it might be until next year until I get to another, especially as I realize I have not read a Christmas novel yet, and I will have to do so on an emergency basis.<\/p>\n
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This book isn’t a complete waste of time, which was the wish I expressed in the report for Twisted Path. Mack Bolan doesn’t smoke a cigarette, for example. The plot: Someone is killing off the Saudi royal family, and it looks like the Iranians and the Russians are working together to install a puppet monarch […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3334,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20,11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-24015","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-book-report","category-books"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24015","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3334"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=24015"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24015\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":24016,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24015\/revisions\/24016"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=24015"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=24015"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=24015"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}