{"id":26937,"date":"2020-10-12T13:30:59","date_gmt":"2020-10-12T18:30:59","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/?p=26937"},"modified":"2020-10-10T20:39:19","modified_gmt":"2020-10-11T01:39:19","slug":"book-report-firebase-florida-by-the-executioner-153-1991","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/2020\/10\/12\/book-report-firebase-florida-by-the-executioner-153-1991\/","title":{"rendered":"Book Report: <i>Firebase Florida<\/i> by The Executioner #153 (1991)"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/bsgfx\/firebaseflorida.jpg\" width=\"200\" alt=\"Book cover\" align=\"right\" hspace=\"4\">You know, gentle reader, for the last couple of weeks, most of my reading has been poetry, art monographs, travel books, and Christian self-help kinds of books (we&#8217;ll get to those by and by).  Given the sheer number of those books that I&#8217;ve polished off in the last couple of weeks, it seems like a long time since I read any fiction (it&#8217;s not&#8211;I read <em><a href=\"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/2020\/09\/27\/book-report-the-widening-gyre-by-robert-b-parker-1983\/\" target=\"_new\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">The Widening Gyre<\/a><\/em> only two weeks ago, but that was a dislocated finger and Exposure Notification ago).  And it&#8217;s only been two months since I read the previous entry in the series (<em><a href=\"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/2020\/08\/10\/book-report-combat-stretch-the-executioner-152-1991\/\" target=\"_new\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Combat Stretch<\/a><\/em>).  Still, it felt a bit refreshing.  Maybe this is actually a better entry in this part of the series.  Who can tell?<\/p>\n<p>At any rate, Mack Bolan is summoned to Florida because some of the Cuban immigrants are setting up a crime syndicate, aided perhaps by the Cuban secret police.  Thirty years after the revolution, some of the first generation refugees are happy with the lives they&#8217;ve built in Florida, but some of their children dream of returning to Cuba triumphantly.  The police detective who summoned Bolan wants him to act as a mentor to these second generation warriors who have amassed a small arsenal of their own.  However, when Bolan starts his probing and hitting, an expert team of hitters from New York comes to take care of him and a Cuban strike team comes to take care of the young second generation soldados.<\/p>\n<p>It moves along well with the set pieces where Bolan is hitting the various criminal locations with only a few &#8220;he shot someone <em>how far<\/em> with a shotgun?&#8221; moments.  All right, a few howlers: Selecting Ingrams and Uzis instead of rifles as the weapon of choice, and later shooting down two <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Mil_Mi-24\">Mi-24 Hinds<\/a> with the aforementioned small arms.  I mean, I had trouble in 1987 playing Gunship winning against Hinds whilst flying a freaking Apache, for crying out loud&#8211;remember flight simulators, how you could sort of realistically fly real aircraft on computers before 2001?<\/p>\n<p>At any rate, I enjoyed the book but for the usual flaws I complain about in the better books in the series: It gets well developed for 150 pages, and then the author remembers he&#8217;s running out of words, so the remainder of the outline gets short shrift.  The stage gets littered with corpses: the soldados, the police detective and his wife, and the love interest die, Bolan hits a military commander&#8217;s house in Cuba, and Bolan hits the Cuban immigrant mobster&#8217;s fortified island, and <em>finis<\/em>.<\/p>\n<p>A too quick resolution, but at least it didn&#8217;t go on too long, I suppose.<\/p>\n<p>So I might not have finished these books yet, but I get ever closer, and I kind of want to read the next in my set.  I&#8217;ll likely be disappointed, of course, which is how I end up with an average time between entries in the series:  I read bad books really quickly after the good ones, and then I read the good ones after a longer gap following the lesser ones.<\/p>\n<p align=\"center\">\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>You know, gentle reader, for the last couple of weeks, most of my reading has been poetry, art monographs, travel books, and Christian self-help kinds of books (we&#8217;ll get to those by and by). Given the sheer number of those books that I&#8217;ve polished off in the last couple of weeks, it seems like a [&hellip;]<\/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-26937","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\/26937","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=26937"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26937\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":26938,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26937\/revisions\/26938"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=26937"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=26937"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=26937"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}