Review: Excellent Entertainment
Rating: 5 out of 5
Date: 09 11, 2013
When I found out that this book was on a free promotion, well, I snapped it up immediately because I'd read and thoroughly enjoyed the author's previous novel so I hoped that I was in for more of the same. And I wasn't to be let down by this exciting action packed thrill of a ride which takes you from sheer horror at witnessing all the gore and carnage to the humour that cuts in now and again to lighten the mood, plus the tender sweet moments between an adult and child with whom the man in charge is trying to protect not only their lives but her sanity too from further damage by pretending that her parents are still alive and they will be re-united. But to spare her feelings, he didn't add that it wouldn't be in this lifetime.The story starts off with Hicks (who is a mercenary) and he soon realises that something major is going down in his neighbourhood, when a whole bunch of killing machine type terrorists take over the UK and begin the slaughter of innocent civilians left, right and centre and he's next in their sights. But the American Hicks isn't like the others so he puts up one hell of a fight and will not die easily as he manages to take out plenty of the bad guys along the way. But the buggers just won't stop coming and poor Hicks hardly has time for a smoke while the stress of his surroundings was almost pouring off the page so much that I nearly took up smoking to cope with the need for the hero Hicks to come good in the end. As he's dealing with this all alone at first until he rescues a little girl named Bethany and her bear called Ringo, whose parents have sadly already been killed. But is a girl with a bubble blowing toy gun really going to help or hinder his plan to stay alive? Then they meet up with his old buddy who is an ex-army British bloke named Singh, whilst they head for the church of St Valentines because they'd heard that there are survivors hold up in there and waiting for help. So after many a gun battle that was truly relentless while being hauntingly described in full detail so that you felt every second of it as it wouldn't let up in the number of baddies ready and willing to take them out. Once there, they met some new decent people at the church who decide to put up a resistance and try to defend themselves from further attacks (bar one who is such a nasty piece of work that you actually wanted the terrorists to get him) whilst waiting for the cover of darkness so that they can escape to the extraction point which is situated at the local John Lennon airport. And this felt very familiar to me, since this is the actual airport in Liverpool that I use whenever I fly anywhere so I could well imagine the scenes as they played out like a movie in my mind. Not all of them will make it this far, how could they when it was a non-stop assault on not only your senses but your heart as you wanted certain people to make it to safety. The ending was brilliant by the way and took me completely by surprise since I wasn't expecting that after all they'd been through and I was literally blown away by it.