Review: Good action but the romance has some flaws
Rating: 3 out of 5
Date: 12 31, 2012
Tactical Deception had a little too many coincidences, a little too many plots, and a little too many mistakes by professional soldiers for me to truly enjoy.  There were times, especially in the beginning chapters that were confusing because I had never read the prequel to this novel and this story seems to be a continuation of the previous book in the series.  I spent the first few chapters trying to piece together the players and scenarios from the earlier book.  The characters refer back to past operations and the reader must piece together the missions since the information does not come all at once.Two team members from this elite military unit dominate the novel.  Both men are your tough-as-nails army guys who are pretty confident and bold.  Rico is a corporal so he is young and in lust with Angie, a character in the previous novel who is a photographer.  He is on leave visiting her in Atlanta when the United States comes under attack by a series of snipers who assassinate citizens indiscriminately.  Rico happens to be in the vicinity of one of these attacks and the FBI and various U.S. Intel groups are interrogating him.  Rico is the only one in America who saw anything.  Angie becomes involved in this mission too.The more complex plot belongs to Roger, the Lt. Col who commands this select cadre of men.  He is burdened with guilt over the loss of one of the men from his unit.  Roger cannot forgive himself for his friend, Neil's, death on their last mission; even worse Roger is in love with his widow Mari.Mari is an Afghani who married Neil when he discovered her starving to death, left to die by her brutal father.  Mari has suffered greatly at the hands of her fellow countrymen.  She loved her husband but has always had a hankering for Roger even while her husband was alive.  Mari is pregnant too, so her husband has not been dead long but she still gets flustered around Roger.Mari was threatened by a white supremacist recently who still wants to kill her and he is in the Fort Bragg area.  Mari is living in Roger's home on the base for protection.  Oh, by the way, Mari's family is all mixed up with terrorism too.  Oh, and she happens to love Roger, the cousin of the President of the United States.  Also when and where did Mari learn English?  This might have been explained in the first book, although I cannot fathom that her strict father allowed her to learn this language.Everything falls apart for Mari when she leaves the post and gets caught up in a riot of protesters in front of the installation gates and is videotaped for the local news which gets broadcast all over the country.  Everyone who wants to hurt her now knows where she lives.  I could not understand why a military service member accompanying Mari would drive toward the main gate where a significant amount of protesters were gathered.  Army bases have several gates, most are for military only which would have no protesters near them.Mari and Roger end up in a lot of danger and what surprised me was how both Roger and Rico forgot their military training.  They act rashly and I just could not imagine professional soldiers not adhering to basic safety procedures especially when civilians are involved.Mari comes from a fundamentalist Muslim background and continues to wear her head covering and her heavy black robes so  I found it near impossible that she would quickly fall into an intimate relationship so soon after her husband's death and without the bonds of marriage.  Also I wondered why her husband or a friend had not urged her to seek professional help on the base for her past traumas in Afghanistan and in the United States.Perhaps if I had read the earlier story I would have felt a stronger connection to the characters but this story moved quickly from one scenario to another.  Rico's relationship with Angie was a very fast moving romance and so was Roger and Mari's.  The action here is tense and it is what makes this book a page turner, the writing is precise and chilling and the villain's brutality was disturbing.  The romance does not have the same tension level as the terrorism plot.